For or whites, the racial gulf in America has never felt so wide these past 20 years or more — how can most American blacks believe (or say they believe) that O. J. Simpson is innocent of a crime science tells us there is a one-in-a-billion chance he did not commit? What is to be done?
You know perfectly well what is to be done. We — that is, we upper-middle-cl ass Whites — must, by a process of study and observation, come to understand . And it will be “white” institutions, from the Ford Foundation to the New York Times to the television networks to America’s corporations, that will in sist on fostering this understanding. Understanding has become a primary go al of our education system, and more time (and foundation money) has been spent devising curricula to teach children understanding than on anything else in recent memory. On v iolent television programs aimed at 4-year-olds, lessons in understanding are taught alongside Thai kickboxing. Across the country, officials at corporations are giving up their Saturday golf to attend diversity seminars at which they are indoctrinated in the religion of understanding.
This religion has deeper roots than the civil-rights movement. One of the key notions of the 20th century is that we can solve problems through the judicious application of understanding. The present-day gospel of “racial outreach” is very much like two of the 20th century’s most persistent gospels – – peace processes and psychoanalysis. All three are ongoing efforts at understanding, whose purpose is to reach concord through sweet reason and sheer doggedness. They are undertaken with no notion of how long they might take or whether they will conclude happily. And they usually become entirely self-referential.
During most peace processes, the players confuse the “process,” which has little meaning, with “peace,” which is achieved not on paper but in the hearts and souls of those who are at war. The same is true of psychoanalysis, where the interplay between doctor and patient itself becomes the process by which the patient may be healed.
So it is with race relations. For those who seek harmony across the color line, the “relations” part of America’s race-relations crisis is often viewed as a solution in itself. And so, in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict, it will be time yet again for whites to understand. Time again to raise white consciousness about the tragic life and history of African-Americans. Conferences will be convened. Editors will commission stories about the murder of Emmit Till and its impact on black public opinion 40years later. Michael Lerner and Cornel West will do another book together, co-host a TV show, win MacArthur Foundation genius grants. The mutual heat of blacks and whites will allow us to weld a new consensus, or so says Frank Rich, the most intelligent and provocative left-wing columnist in the country: “I hole that some of the anger on all sides, mine included, will linger a bit, redhot yet controlled, as a prod to find our way out of this country’s racial morass.”
For the American liberal establishment, this has become the stock response after a public outrage that divides Americans by color. Did black rioters do $ 1 billion worth of damage in Los Angeles after the acquittal of four cops in the Rodney King beating? Did those riots say something about the death of civil culture in poor black neighborhoods — $ 250 million worth of destruction per acquittal? No, it remained a tale of police brutality and racism run amok — and we have to understand.
Did gang members go on a murderous rampage through the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights after a car driven by a Hasid spun out of control and killed a 7 year-old black boy? Was the obvious killer of the Australian Hasid who was murdered during that pogrom set free by a predominantly black jury? Time for outreach in Crown Heights — the Hasidim have to understand.
The Tawana Brawley hoax, the reelection of Marion Barry, the Liberty City riots in Miami, the mere fact that an anti-Semitic psychotic like Louis Farrakhan continues to strut his hour upon the public stage in the United States — the response is inevitably the same. Sessions between white and black leaders, moving stories of friendship between a former racist and a Black Panther broadcast on CBS Sunday Morning, more conferences, NPR reports of role-playing games between black kids and white kids. The fetishizing of race relations continues. According to this civil religion, race relations must be tended, nurtured, and never left to their own devices, otherwise where will we be?
Where we will be is no different from where we are right now. For the gospel of understanding will not, cannot, work in this case. I understand why blacks — a gut-wrenching 90 percent of them, according to one poll — are happy with the Simpson verdict. I understand that blacks think either a) that he was framed by Mark Fuhrman and many fellow conspirators, or b) that the murder of two people is less important than “sending a message” to the Los Angeles police department and to white America in general.
The affront in the Simpson case is that a sizeable, definable minority in the United States has either fallen victim to a demented politics of conspiracy or believes that Mark Fuhrman’s sociopathological use of the word “nigger” justifi es the release of a man who nearly decapitated the mother of his children and t hen slaughtered the bystander who showed up at her door to deliver her forgotte n sunglasses. Though I have always resisted Andrew Hacker’s idea that America i s divided into two nations, it is difficult to deny it in the wake of the Simps on verdict. Is black America so lost in its own resentment that it no longer ha s the capacity to feel empathy for the f amily of Ronald Goldman as they wept in that courtroom with the knowledge that the world saw the murderer of their son, their brother, their beloved boy, go free — that they feel closer kinship to a killer because of his skin color than to the killer’s victims?
I can understand how this has happened. But that understanding makes me sick, and it makes me furious, and it makes me ashamed to be an American for the first time in my life.
