(Beach) Food for Thought – We’re still at Chincoteague, and have about worn ruts in the (paved) bike paths, although we have seen different ponies each time. Given the absence of a phone in our cottage and the necessity to pay a phone fee, albeit minimal (no local access number for Earthlink on the island, but their 800 number doesn’t charge much), when I accept the Comfort Inn’s generosity in letting me use their conference room to check email etc. (can’t download and/or compose easily from the library’s occasionally available computer), I’ve been having some trouble keeping up with both the real world and the blog world. But then, that’s what vacations are for.
Anyway, I’ve been enjoying Yale law prof Stephen Carter’s new novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, and have run across a couple of passages that, especially given my limited access at the moment to other material, seem worth sharing.
For those of you who haven’t read it or the reviews, the protagonist, Talcott Garland, is a young middle-aged, tenured black (or as he would put it, member of the “darker nation”) prof at an Ivy League law school that eerily resembles Yale. Garland’s father, the Judge, who dies in possibly mysterious circumstances shortly after the book opens, was a well-known conservative judge whose appointment to the Supreme Court by Reagan was Borked, which embittered him and turned him even more rightward. He resigned from his district court judgeship and became a staple on the circuit of “Rightpacs,” the conservative public interest groups. His son, the protagonist, is bitter about both left and right.
Two excerpts:
Last year I greatly upset the students in my seminar on Law and Social Movements by suggesting to them the following proposition: Any white person who truly believes in affirmative action should be willing to pledge that, if his or her child is admitted to a Harvard or a Princeton, he or she will at once write to the school saying, “My child will not be attending. Please hold the slot for a member of a minority group.” The consternation among my students confirmed my belief that few white people, even among the most liberal, support affirmative action when it actually costs them something. They like it precisely because they can tell themselves that they are working for racial justice while pretending that the costs do not exist. But it is not their fault: who believes in sacrifice these days? [pp. 182-183]
. . . .
Little time…. He used those words often in his speeches, in trying to explain to his friends in the Rightpacs why they needed . . . well, racial diversity. The median American, he loved to tell his eager audiences, is socially conservative. The median black American, the Judge would add, is even more conservative. Look at the data on any question, he would rumble. School prayer? Black Americans favor it more than whites do. Abortion? Black Americans are more pro-life than whites. Vouchers? Black Americans support them more strongly than whites. Gay rights? Black Americans are more skeptical than whites. The applause would roll across his (overwhelmingly white) audience. Then he would hit them with the big windup: Conservatives are the last people who can afford to be racist. Because the future of conservatism is black America! They would go wild for him. I never saw it in person, but I saw it, often, on C-SPAN. And whichever Rightpac he was speaking to would march out to try to recruit black members, because, he would insist, there is little time . . . and, almost always, the recruitment effort would fail . . . quite abysmally. Because there were a few little details the Judge always left out. Like the fact that it was conservatives who fought against just about every civil rights law ever proposed. Like the fact that many of the wealthy men who paid for his expensive speeches would not have him in their clubs. Like the fact that it was the great conservative hero Ronald Reagan who kicked off his campaign by talking about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a location with a certain resonance in the darker nation, and who, as President, backed tax exemptions for the South’s many segregation academies. The Judge was surely right to insist that the time has come for black Americans to stop trusting white liberals, who are far more comfortable telling us what we need than asking us what we want, but he never did come up with a particularly persuasive reason for us to start trusting white conservatives instead. [pp. 205-206]
Correction – The Judge, the protagonist’s father, had been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, not a district court judge as I stated in my summary above.
