Black Commentator vs. The Wall Street Journal

By BC Associate Editor Bruce Dixon

In their quest for absolute political hegemony in the
United States, some elements of the Right now dare to
claim to share with blacks - if not common cause -
common conclusions about the state of race relations in
America. In a January 8, 2006 piece weighted with the
full freight of centuries of white supremacist
delusions, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto
claimed that BC’s January 5, 2006 Cover Story, "Katrina
Study: Black Consensus, White Dispute," showed that BC
and the WSJ agree that African Americans and whites see
the world quite differently.

The BC story was based on a small slice of an
important, soon to be released study by University of
Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson. Dr.
Dawson’s team’s study shows what every conscious Black
person already knows: there is a yawning chasm between
white and black perceptions of life, politics and
opportunity in 21st Century America.

The United States has created wildly different
realities for its black and white citizens. From the
unequal availability of prenatal care and early
childhood education, through ubiquitous and continuing
racially segregated education and racially selective
policies of crime control and mass imprisonment,
through generations of housing and employment
discrimination resulting in huge gaps in the
accumulation of wealth between black and white
families, to early graves occasioned by differential
access to medical care for African Americans, it is
clear that for centuries blacks and whites have lived
in the same country but in different worlds. Perhaps
we should be grateful that the esteemed editor of the
Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has deigned to
acknowledge this fact. Or maybe not.

The WSJ’s Taranto begins his January 8, 2005
OpinionJournal.com column thusly:

"BlackCommentator.com, which describes itself as a
source of ’commentary, analysis and investigations
on issues affecting African Americans’ and has a
harshly left-wing outlook, has an analysis of a
poll on racial attitudes in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina. BC.com’s analysis is remarkably similar to
our analysis, back in September, of a similar
poll:"

Taranto goes on to quote BC at some length:

"Hurricane Katrina may mark a watershed in Black
perceptions of the African American presence and
prospects in the United States. ’It could very well
shape this generation of young people in the same
way that the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King shaped our generation,’ said Prof.
Michael Dawson, of the University of Chicago whose
team conducted a survey of Black and white
reactions to the disaster between October 28 and
November 17, 2005. ’It suggested to Blacks the
utter lack of the liberal possibility in the United
States,’ said Dawson, the nation’s premier Black
social demographer.

"Huge majorities of Blacks agreed that the federal
government’s response would have been faster if the
victims of Katrina in New Orleans had been white
(84 percent), and that the Katrina experience shows
there is a lesson to be learned about continued
racial inequality (90 percent).

"But only 20 percent of whites believe that the
federal government’s failure to respond had
anything to do with race, and only 38 percent think
there is something to be learned about racial
inequality from the Katrina disaster. . . .

"A Grand Canyon looms between the way African
Americans and white people view the world, despite
the fact that both groups are privy to the same
information and images.

Same planet. Different worlds. Unintentionally,
Taranto manages to prove both his and our point by
misstating his very small area of agreement with us
harsh leftists at BC. The poll he cites does indeed
illuminate the same gulf between black and white views
of the Katrina disaster as last week’s BC cover story
reported. What the Wall Street Journal agrees with BC
about, and then only implicitly, is the existence of
what we call the Black Consensus. But what Taranto
offers by way of "analysis" is the very embodiment of
racist arrogance. He writes:

"The truth about race that Katrina illuminates,
then, is that, at least when it comes to matters
involving race, black Americans are extreme
political outliers. This is why attempts to play
the race card are politically futile: They have to
appeal not just to blacks, but to a substantial
minority of whites. The Gallup poll results make
clear that the current racial appeals are not
resonating with whites."

Here we find exposed the delusional heart of whiteness.
Taranto would dismiss African American opinions on race
wholesale as "extreme," "outlying," and "playing the
race card." For the Wall Street Journal and the chunk
of America’s ruling elite and wannabes it speaks for
and to, black opinion fails the fundamental test of
legitimacy simply because it differs from white
opinion. Taranto goes on to supersize his ahistorical
silliness.

"Why do blacks and whites have such divergent views
on racial matters? We would argue that it is
because of the course that racial policies have
taken over the past 40 years?"

For Taranto, the difference between black and white
views on race owes nothing to centuries of slavery,
nothing to generations of de jure and de facto
segregation. It has nothing to do with the
criminalization of a generation of black youth by a
racially selective crime control and prison industry,
and is completely unrelated to the fact that African
Americans pay more for the same services, are
compensated less for the same education and job
performance, live shorter lives with less medical care
and are much more likely to experience poverty,
especially as elders or children. For Taranto, nearly
four hundred years and counting of black experience in
America that often differs substantially from that of
our white neighbors, is irrelevant. Instead, it all
stems from white resentment at being "discriminated"
against by affirmative action, and black sour grapes at
not achieving "equality of results" in the imagined
meritocracy that is the Wall Street Journal’s America.
The solution recommended by the editor of WSJ’s opinion
page is for white America to stay the course and wait
out the Black Consensus until it’s replaced by what he
calls "more nuanced ideas about race" in a decade or
two.

We suspect Mr. Taranto is in for a much longer wait
than he expects. The Black Consensus that he would de-
legitimize, wait out or wish away, and the distance
between it and white opinion is an outcome of white
supremacy as practiced by America’s ruling circles and
actively or passively endorsed by most of its white
citizens. The gap between white and black opinion will
only narrow if and to the extent that American whites
learn to stop thinking like white people so that
progress can be made toward equality of opportunity for
everybody, a goal which Taranto also dismisses as
impractical and unworthy.

In a sane, democratic and educated society, whose
citizens are acquainted with their own history and
served by a press and broadcast media which equips them
with the information necessary to the exercise of
responsible citizenship, septic nonsense like Taranto’s
would be swiftly laughed out of the public space. But
this is 21st century America, where unelected pirates
rule, the public airwaves are private property and the
press is only free for those who own it.

Black public opinion does not have to be legitimized by
whites. The Black Consensus is not the voice of
extremists and outliers. It is the prophetic voice
that calls all of us, of whatever color, class and
creed to responsible citizenship and real humanity.
African Americans knew, presumably with near unanimity
that slavery was wrong before most of white America
would admit it. Our black grandparents and great
grandparents were certain that convict leasing, Jim
Crow and lynching were abominations at the same time
the Supreme Court and white public opinion ignored or
endorsed these practices. Were our forbears right all
along? Or only when whites agreed with them?

Today black public opinion opposes the war in Iraq by
more than two to one. African Americans overwhelmingly
favor full and equal funding for public education,
ending the so-called drug war, mandating the right to
organize and join unions, health care as a human right,
and impeachment of the president. Are we extremists?
Outliers? Or prophets? Time will tell.

We take this opportunity to acknowledge a debt of
gratitude to Dr. Michael Dawson, the nation’s foremost
black demographer, for his pioneering research into
black public opinion, black political thought, and the
Black Consensus. The three questions in last week’s BC
cover story were lifted from a larger study of the
state of public opinion in America’s black communities
that will be published very soon. Look out for it. If
Taranto and the Wall Street Journal admire Dr. Dawson’s
science and BC’s logical analysis, we find that
interesting. But being "harsh leftists," we are not
flattered.

Please send your correspondence to BC Associate Editor
Bruce A. Dixon at Bruce.Dixon@blackcommentator.com

http://www.blackcommentator.com/166/166_cover_bc_vs_wsj.html