Redstate

By Matt Rosenberg Posted in User Blogs — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

At the age of 12, in 1970, I found my very white self living in a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago called South Shore. Though then considered home to the black aristocracy of Chicago, the class spectrum was fully covered. If not the race spectrum. Walking to and from Bryn Mawr Bowl along East 71st Street, and exploring the neighborhood on my bicycle, I came to feel somewhat apart from my surroundings.

I discovered that black people could express immediately racist sentiments toward me without our having exchanged one word first.There was the black proprietor of fast-food joint who studiously ignored me for 10 minutes, refusing to take my order, though no one else was in the place and he clearly had nothing to do. Another time, a black kid my age saw me ride past his house (a pretty nice one, I recall) and launched into a shouted, profanity-laced racist diatribe.

A bit more nuanced, was the occasion, back across the "border" in the then-whiter Hyde Park district, when a group of black kids saw me coming out of my dad's office building at the University of Chicago. As he and I crossed the street to the parking lot, one said to the others, loudly, his voice dripping with contempt, "Look at WHITE boy, with his DADDY."

That has stuck with me over the years, for it spoke volumes. This was an odd, and white sight to him: a boy with his father.

Hardly the stuff of lynchings and slavery endured by blacks at the hands of racist whites, any of it. But such experiences had an effect. I've never bought the liberal dogma that blacks couldn't be racist because they had suffered. Or that their judgements and personal choices couldn't be as skewed as anybody else's.

To still today enshrine blacks as persecuted and irreproachable, unable to bear responsibility for their own actions and decisions has always struck me as far more than paternalistic - it is undeniably racist. Yet it is the way many whites - especially those in the 2004 "Blue State" urban enclaves - remain conditioned to think.

After beginning a three-year stint as a guest opinion page columnist for The Seattle Times in April 2001, I felt little discomfort writing honestly about Seattle's bogus, retrograde racial politics; about guilty white liberals and their insidious soft bigotry toward blacks; and about dysfunction in the black family tied to crime, education, and economic advancement. (At Rosenblog, you'll see links to some of these under "Freelance Opinion Pieces;" they'll be obvious by their titles).

I've been told by one black community leader in Seattle, even as she was cooperating with me on a column I was writing about a grassroots black self-help campaign she helped launch, that such matters were really not my business in the end, because I was white.

I thought, but did not say, that if I had been writing about white oppression of blacks, she likely would have had no objection. I replied that if we all extended her logic - thought, commentary and discourse would become completely balkanized.

Only blacks could talk about blacks; whites about whites; Asians about Asians; Muslims about Muslims. Or perhaps, I imagined later, some social arbiter could define the "oppressed"' races and classes, and decree that they, and only they, could speak about other groups with impunity.

Hold on. Is that not what media have done?

I am generally skeptical of talk about "public conversations." In my beloved adopted home of Seattle, they embody the art of avoidance, the offloading of personal responsibility, the celebration of "institutional racism," the sensitive salving of white guilt with theraputic gab.

I am more attuned to results than process. But there is a new and important chapter today in America's "conversation" about race; a new openness about black self-responsibility, about the emptiness of blaming Whitey first and always for broken families, high incarceration rates and poor achievement in school.

Writers like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell - and later, John McWhorter - have paved the way. And Bill Cosby busted the door wide open last May, saying things publicly that he and other blacks have been saying to each other for decades before. Of the more than 200 comments left so far at one of my blog posts on Cosby's remarks, many are from self-identified blacks. Some revile Cosby, some respectfully differ, and a great many agree - strongly.

Like those black respondents to my blog, black bloggers with their own sites are also advancing honest, open discussion on personal responsibility, race, and the role of government.

One important web portal to such bloggers is the Conservative Brotherhood. One member, D.C. Thornton, observes that President Bush acknowledged recently in a speech to the National Urban League that the Republican Party “has got a lot of work to do” to win the trust of blacks who would otherwise vote Democratic by default.

However, Thornton adds that, "the black community also has a lot of work to do to encourage the diversity of ideas, and discourage those who threaten such intellectual diversity.....(Yes) The Black community has always had intellectual diversity. (But) by and large, the black community prefers that it stays in the closet, on the down low." (The full post and comment string, here).

This commenter at Thornton's site offers some sage advice for Bush.

"What (Republicans) should do is to continue the thankless, dirty-work that needs to be done to boost the safety, security, performance and self-reliance of the black community - from serious standardized testing, to tough crime controls (where black VICTIMS are actually the focus not felons), to serious vouchers, to “heartless” spending reductions on ineffective programs."

In a recent Detroit radio interview, Cosby made a crucial point about community-based programs to help economically-disadvantaged blacks. Such efforts can succeed if, and only if, the family is involved. They can augment, but not replace fully engaged parents.

Cosby said:

“Our young people need mentoring, but it needs to be in an organized manner,” he said. “We need the organizations (to help), but it’s no good unless the lower economic people also take on a role themselves. There are young women with children that need to be taught how to parent. Mentoring could really help them.”

I suspect Karl Rove and George Bush are paying very close attention to the limited-government, self-help message coming from a growing chorus of black Americans today. These include less traditional "black leaders" such as Bill Cosby, plus black entreprenuers, the growing black middle-class, and even conservative black bloggers.

If Rove is smart, he's got a meeting scheduled with Bill Cosby. And now that Cosby - in a series of high-profile speeches and media appearances - has championed the decisive power of the black individual, he needs to mull and then reveal which candidate he believes can best help blacks left behind help themselves.

The NAACP is in its own wax museum, along with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and The Democratic Party. The question is not whether, or even how, Republicans will begin to capture a greater share of the black vote, but how soon?