Where race is concerned — today as yesterday the most profound but botched up and phonied over issue in our national politics — the Republicans are bad enough. In private life, black and white Americans smile uneasily at one another across a wide divide of consciousness. In public life, the Constitution commands our laws be scrubbed clean of such race consciousness in all but the very rarest and narrowest of circumstances. So sayeth a one-vote majority of the Supreme Court, anyway. Yet our laws still stink with thousands of programs, large and small, that reward or disfavor us according to our skin color — and our sex and what continents our great-grandfathers lived on. What a sad, enormous ball of hypocrisy and incoherence the whole thing is. And what disappointing dopes these Republicans are about it: that after years and years of painful practice, they still cannot establish, in the same breath, that their hearts are right and their minds are focused.
During a news conference last March, George W. Bush was asked to elucidate his position on affirmative action — the system of racial numerology by which his and every other state continues to dole out employment and contracting spoils. “I support goals,” Bush replied. “I think it is important to have goals.” And, to complete the classic weasel: “What I’m against is quotas. I’m against hard quotas, quotas that basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think, vulcanize society. So I don’t know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that’s my position.” Two days after Bush let loose this bit of eloquent philosophy, the Austin American-Statesman was generous enough to report that it had perhaps misquoted him; the governor might have warned that quotas “Balkanize,” not “vulcanize.” And then, eight months later on NBC’s Meet the Press, in the exact same context, Bush said “vulcanize” again.
Might it also be a tad vulcanizing, 135 years after Appomattox, to have the battle standard of slave-holding secession still flying over one of our constitutionally reunited states? Governor Bush has lately had difficulty offering a direct opinion; it is a local matter, after all. As, he believes, it is properly a matter local to the campus of Bob Jones University that its black and white students are not allowed to go on dates together — and Bush wishes we would all stop bugging him about it, too. The governor has recently managed a straight answer about the practice of stop-and-question racial profiling by police departments; he’s “against it.” That is something, one supposes.
And one supposes John McCain may yet explain how the Confederate stars and bars might be an offensive “symbol of racism” and an honorable “symbol of heritage,” all at once. Or how the antediluvian fraternization policies at Bob Jones might simply be an “idiotic” anomaly at an otherwise “fine academic school.” Or how, “of course, of course,” racial profiling “should be stopped,” on the one hand — but continued, on the other, for people who are “terrorists” and “fit that description.” Senator McCain, incidentally, also claims to oppose quotas, though he voted to sustain a notoriously rigid Transportation Department contracting set-aside — after that quota was specifically tagged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court’s 1995 Adarand ruling. McCain says Antonin Scalia, who joined the majority in Adarand, is a model justice. But only sometimes, apparently.
Go figure. Put a question about race to the Republican party’s presidential candidates and they haul out not some consistent understanding of constitutional morality, but a plastic Magic 8 Ball novelty toy, one stuck always in the same place: Reply hazy, ask again later. Such timidity and confusion.
But we knew that about them already. Just as we already knew that timidity and confusion about race is not a problem that plagues the Democratic party’s presidential contenders. Not at all. Al Gore and Bill Bradley would either of them give us two, three, many race-preference-friendly Supreme Court justices. They would give us a quota in every pot: a federal government and local school teaching staffs and private workplaces that look like America, vulcanized right down to statistical perfection. And they would happily be known for those plans — at least to their party’s primary electorate. None of this is news.
What is big news — or should have been big news had not everyone been distracted by the Republican spectacle in South Carolina — is the extent to which Gore and Bradley have both lately proved themselves willing, in the struggle for a presidential nomination, to truck with the most aggressive imaginable race hatred, even with a whiff of racial violence. Nothing Bush and McCain have done comes close.
We are referring here to the Reverend Al Sharpton of Harlem’s “National Action Network.” New York breeds cancerous racial hysteria the way Nebraska grows corn. And every such outbreak, it seems, is led by Sharpton. Sharpton was principal spokesman for the infamous Tawana Brawley abduction-and-rape hoax. Sharpton was principal spokesman for the “wilding” youths convicted in the “Central Park jogger” case. Sharpton directed the mob that attacked reporters covering lawyers for the accused killers of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. Sharpton encouraged the anti-Semitic protests that became the Crown Heights riot of 1991. Sharpton juiced up the crowds about “white interlopers” and “diamond merchants” at Freddy’s Fashion Mart on Harlem’s 125th Street in 1995. Freddy’s then was firebombed and eight people died. Sharpton has never so much as apologized for any of this. Sharpton is a dangerous demagogue.
But, depressingly enough, Sharpton seems also to be a man, based on two statewide Senate campaigns and a mayoral candidacy in the 1990s, who can deliver New York’s black electorate. And so, depressingly enough, Bill Bradley and Al Gore have both been eager to secure Sharpton’s blessing in advance of the New York state primary March 7 — the first day of the Democratic presidential nominating calendar on which black voters will go to the polls in sizable numbers. Bradley and Gore have disgraced themselves.
Bradley started it, though a fat lot of good it has ultimately done him. Late last August, Dollar Bill, Mr. Piety, shared a stage at the smiling Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters and proclaimed, “This is the home of justice.” Next, after his usual creepy vaporizing about “white skin privilege,” Bradley actually repeated — and so endorsed — the standard, violence-threatening slogan of American race-baiters everywhere: “No justice, no peace.” Bill Bradley thus instantly disqualified himself for the presidency.
But not with Al Sharpton. Sharpton was mighty pleased by Bradley’s attention. And spent the next few months hinting that he might go ahead and endorse the former senator unless Gore paid him equivalent tribute. The vice president did eventually invite Sharpton to a private, off-the-record meeting with other “black leaders” in Manhattan in early November. But that wasn’t enough. “He needs to talk to people like me publicly,” Sharpton explained. “Without my support . . . [Gore] clearly can’t win.” And “I wouldn’t support anyone who wouldn’t come see me.”
Two weeks ago, Bradley dramatically raised the ante in the Al Sharpton sweepstakes. He once again materialized next to Rev. Al — this time at a press conference in Queens — and demanded that Gore join him in a pre-primary, Sharpton-organized New York debate about racial issues. Sharpton, for his part, demanded that Gore respond “by the end of the week,” or else “certainly some of us may mobilize against his efforts.”
And that red flag seems finally to have done the trick. By Sunday, February 13, Gore had given Sharpton everything he wanted, including a one-on-one, closed-door meeting in the Upper East Side apartment of the vice president’s daughter, Karenna. Gore is to participate this week, in public with Sharpton, at the sought-for debate. Sharpton says he is “impressed.” Sharpton will not, gossip in the New York dailies indicates, endorse Bill Bradley, after all. This thing is mercifully, if grotesquely, almost over.
Or maybe not. By unfortunate coincidence, another Al Sharpton-saturated event is also nearing its denouement this week. Closing arguments are now underway in the trial of four New York City police officers charged with murdering West African immigrant Amadou Diallo in the South Bronx last February. For a year, Sharpton has led protests against this “racially motivated” police “assassination.” But after two weeks of gripping testimony, it now appears possible — even likely — that the jury will conclude the shooting was an accident or at worst a matter of negligence. The officers may be acquitted of murder, in other words. It may happen right before the March 7 presidential primary. If it does, someone in Al Sharpton’s malignant ambit will almost certainly try to start a major civil disturbance. This is what these people do for a living, you see. And they very often succeed.
Pray that this time they fail. For all the obvious reasons, of course. And for one other. A riot would force both parties’ presidential candidates to react. There’s little evidence that the Republicans are up to the task. Mortgaged as they now are to Al Sharpton, anything Al Gore and Bill Bradley might have to say — anything at all — is too disgusting to contemplate.
David Tell, for the Editors
