Black Studies And The National Character

An article in the New York Times this morning discusses the crisis in Black Studies caused by the fact that Hispanics have just emerged officially as the nation’s largest minority group.

“African-Americans and the African-American leadership community are about to enter an identity crisis, the extent of which we’ve not begun to imagine,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the Afro-American Studies department at Harvard University said of the new census numbers.

“For 200 years, the terms ‘race’ or ‘minority’ connoted black-white race relations in America,” he said. “All of a sudden, these same terms connote black, white, Hispanic. Our privileged status is about to be disrupted in profound ways.”

As a field of research black studies is as legitimate as any other, but as an academic fiefdom Black Studies owes its existence to the political and social trends of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus it is particularly vulnerable to new trends. As Kim Butler, a Rutgers professor put it,

We do not have that [former]political groundswell or demand to support the expansion of black studies. We’re out of style…. Since the demographic shift, people are concerned with the Latino vote, the Latinos as a marketing bloc.

Others are less concerned.

“There is something deep and profound in the DNA of the country that is tied to the enslavement of Africans, the trauma of slavery and the legacy of disfranchisement,” said Noliwe Rooks, associate director of Princeton’s African-American studies program. Conversations about the legacy of slavery, she said, “don’t change because there are more Latinos in the country.”

Ms. Rooks seems to be concerned with marshalling that uniqueness argument to persuade Princeton to promote Black Studies from a program to a department (surely Chairman West sounds better than Director West), but that doesn’t concern me. I am, however, quite taken with her notion of “the DNA of the country.”

I think it exists. I think countries, in many ways like people, differ, and they do so in ways and for reasons that go far beyond superficial appearances. It’s not so much that they have different histories as that their different histories, plus who knows what, have made them different. I’m not sure what “national character” actually is, but I’m confident it exists. I suspect it’s very similar to individual character, a composite of experience, personality, and values. In short, core values and principles reside in that national DNA. They may have the place of honor there.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my main point: if we were starting afresh, or had a different history, it might make perfect sense to think of ourselves primarily as a confederacy of racial and ethnic and religious groups. The Constitution of a society so constituted would locate rights in groups, not individuals, and it would be the duty of the government to regulate the racial and religious “market” to ensure that all were fairly represented. There would be no anti-discrimination laws, since all would be required to “take race into account” and award preferences to promote racial balance, and there similarly would be no wall of separation between church and state because religious identity is as important as racial identity and religious groups, too, would have a right to be included, by preference if necessary.

Calvin Trillin once wrote that barbecue not from Kansas City could be very good … but it wasn’t barbecue. Similarly, the above group-based society is not inherently unappealing … but it’s not ours.

As I have discussed in part here, our own actual history, emerging as it did in an era when religion played the role that race does now and religious conflict among the plentiful religious sects was a constant threat, embedded the principles of individual, not group, rights and official neutrality toward all constitutent groups deep into our national DNA, and into our Constitution. I believe that the 14th Amendment, the Mother of the civil rights movement, can best be understood as embodying, albeit imperfectly, the principle that race, like religion and for the same reasons, must be walled off from government favor or disfavor. Conversely, if there is no principled barrier against racial preferences, there can be no principled barrier against religious preferences either.

There is, however, another, equally American way to look at our history. The Puritans believed that floods, pestilence, droughts, disease, and other calamaties that we would think of as natural disasters were God’s deserved punishment for societies when they failed to measure up morally. From the beginning until, arguably, quite recently our society’s treatment of blacks has violated — according to some, shown the hollowness of — what I keep referring to as our core values and basic principles. From this perspective, perhaps those values and principles don’t deserve to survive. Perhaps racial preferences are the avenging sword of an angry god, the instrument of divine retribution. Some might say that would be an altogether fitting and proper reward for slavery and discrimination.

This, of course, is a bit melodramatic. It’s hard to see Kweisi Mfume or Al Sharpton or Tom Daschle and the Democrats or the army of liberal law professors as agents, even if unwitting, of the divine. But whether they are divinely inspired or not, we should be very clear that the principles underlying the new order of preferentialism that is being urged upon us are fundamentally incompatible with our traditional principles of official neutrality and individual as opposed to group rights, especially the individual right to be treated “without regard” to race, religion, or national origin.