THE END OF RELATIVISM

The publisher’s publicity calls The End of Racism a “sweeping” and ” bold” book that “challenges the last taboo” about racism. And the book is laced with incendiary sentences, like this one: “If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” And this: “It is hard not to hear the triumphant roar of the white supremicist: ‘Forget about the legacy of racism and discrimination: these people are naturally stupid.'” Chapter titles, too. One section on behavioral problems among poor blacks is entitled “Uncle Tom’s Dilemma: Pathologies of Black Culture.” Another discusses race and IQ under the heading “The Content of Our Chromosomes.”

The controversy will not be limited to turns of phrase; the ideas, too, are explosive. D’Souza claims that most middle class blacks owe their prosperity to affrmative action, and then speculates they must suffer “intense feelings of guilt” because “they have abandoned their poor brothers and sisters, and realize that their present circumstances became possible solely because of the heart-wrenching sufferings of the underclass.” And in a pithy turn of phrase that really ought not to have got past his editors, he ridicules those who are afraid that Nazi-like crimes could result if belief in the biological inferiority of blacks were to become widespread: such people, he writes, ” employ the reductio ad Hitlerum — an argument is necessarily false if Hitler happened to share the same view.”

If one were to adopt the voice used by D’Souza throughout the book, one might speculate that he actually longs to hear those “triumphant roars,” from black and white racists alike, because such vitriolic discussion sells books. But ad hominem (or is it ad Hitlerum?) rhetoric like that is unbecoming. Suffce it to say that, by examining this book’s reception — how it is attacked and by whom it is defended-one will learn a great deal about the true, and unbearably sad, nature of race relations in our society. More, perhaps, than can be learned from a careful study of its pages.

Which is not to say the book has no argument. But much that is compelling in it has been said before, more carefully, and with greater dignity. D’Souza restates the devastating critique of civil rights orthodoxy developed by Thomas Sowell in a number of books starting two decades ago. Sowell noted that, because ethnic groups are endowed with unequal cultures, histories, and temperaments, group disparities per se do not prove the existence of discrimination. He argued that racism need not lead to discrimination; that segregation did not necessarily connote a belief in racial inferiority or redound to the detriment of blacks; and that in any case, belief in the innate inferiority of a group is neither necessary nor suffcient for the existence of inter-group conflict.Sowell observed that the use of group stereotypes is a universal, rational, human behavior, and refuted a host of assertions about the relevance to contemporary moral debates of American slavery. He emphasized the self-serving character of much civil rights advocacy. And, most important, he exposed, and rejected as incoherent, the implicit assumptions — what he called “the vision” — underlying the legal and policy claims of civil rights proponents.

What is best in The End of Racism updates and embellishes these Sowellian themes. But D’Souza aspires to be a social thinker in his own right; indeed, his title recalls the Hegelian tone of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, the acclaimed volume on the deeper meaning of the collapse of communism. D’Souza, also looking for broad historical forces, reasons that if we can understand how racism came into the modern world, then perhaps, as with communism, we can envision its end.

He finds that racism originated five centuries ago, when Europe emerged as the world’s dominant economic and technological civilization. At the same time, Europeans encountered the more backward peoples of Asia, the Americas, and especially sub-Saharan Africa. The obvious disparity of accomplishment between different peoples led many Europeans to explain their dominance as the result of their biological superiority. Thus was racism born, a product of Western reason, the result of a rational effort to account for certain conspicuous facts. As historian Winthrop Jordan has put it, “racism developed in conjunction with Enlightenment, not in resistance to it.”

So much the worse for Enlightenment, one might say, but D’Souza does not think so. He really believes this obvious historical point is relevant to contemporary racial debates. How? Because it gives the lie to the liberal claim that racism must be the result of ignorance, fear, or superstition. Quoting Hume (“I . . . suspect the Negroes . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites”), Kant (“The Negroes . . . have received from nature no intelligence that rises above the foolish”), and Hegel (“The Negro race has perfect contempt for humanity”), D’Souza declares: “These views pose a problem to mainstream scholars today . . . because they call the widely shared premises of modern antiracism into question.” Unlike those liberals, D’Souza sees nobility in historic racism: “[It] reflected the highest ethical ideals of the most enlightened sectore of society. It was a progressive view. Opposition to it was considered to be a sign of ignorance or religious dogmatism.” This would make the old liberal epithet, “ignorant racist,” an oxymoron.

Never mind that one after another of these “enlightened” racial claims proved to be wrong, and that, across the globe and over the centuries, great crimes against humanity were perpetrated because of these claims, crimes denounced by “religious dogmatists” even as they were being carried out. The Enlightenment was not an unqualified success for humanism, as John Paul II never tires of saying, and as the torturous history of scientific racism makes clear. But D’Souza is too concerned with the shortcomings of”liberal antiracism” to dwell on a simple ethical truth: the intellectual, military, or economicachievements of a civilization do not confer moral worth, or moral wisdom, on its constituents.

Curiously, given its subject, this book is devoid of serious moral argument. D’Souza has discovered that slavery was not a racist institution, as today’s liberals charge. Why? Because there were black slaveholders (a fact he finds ” morally disturbing”); because only the West made the ethics of slavery an issue; and because the belief in black inferiority arose, in part, to justify a practice inconsistent with cherished American ideals. Though these points are not without interest, stating them only begins an argument; many issues remain unresolved,

If a tiny fraction of all slaveholders, but every one of the millions of slaves, were black, how is the notion that slavery was a system of racial domination thereby refuted? Which is more compelling — that Western ideals existed, or that they went unrealized? After all, the issue is not whether America is morally superior to Saudi Arabia, but whether America is all it can and should be. If belief in black inferiority arose for complex reasons, it is nonetheless a pernicious doctrine that has never been strictly scientific in character. Moreover, it is a doctrine with far-reaching and genuinely disturbing moral implications What, pray tell, is wrong with a strong presumption against it?

It is inarguably the case that absent the deeply committed, religiousely motivated protests of abolitionists, slavery might well have survived into the 20th century. It is also inarguable that without the moralistic efforts of the liberal antiracists who founded the NAACP, fought the Ku Klux Klan, and laid the foundation for the modern civil rights movement, the caste-like subordination of blacks might still be a fact of life in America. D’Souza knows all of this, but he is not moved by it. What excites him is the chance to score points against his political enemies, the contemparary civil rights establishment.

To this end, he advances a peculiar (and weak) anthropological argument. According to D’Souza, the dual racial scourges of our day — affirmative action and black social pathology — share a common intellectual heritage with the ideology of antiracism. This heritage is rooted in the idea of ” cultural relativesm,” made popular by the anthropologists Franz Boas and his students in the early decades of this century. Mr. D’Souza refers to this purportedly bankrupt perspective as “Boasian relativism.” Because of its attachment to these ideas, the civil rights movement and its liberal allies have failed their black constituants and, D’Souza fears, now threaten to ruin American civilization. If ever we are to see the end of racism, we must first abandon the doctrine ofBoasian relativism.

D’Souza’s reasoning goes like this: Boasian relativism is the idea that all cultures are inherently equal, and in particular, that Western culture is neither better nor worse than any other. Hence, a true relativist expects people from different groups to succeed equally in American society, unless they are artificially held back. Since blacks have not succeeded to the same extent as whites and Asians, the relativist simply must conclude that blacks are the victims of racism, and that American society must be reformed, by coercion if necessary, to secure the just outcome. And the relativist cannot believe that pathological social behavior among blacks reflects their lack of culture and civilization, since it is axiomatis to him that all cultures are equal. Hence, the relativist cannot condemnsuch behavior as uncivilized; he can only view it as the result of failures in American society.

Complaining about Boasian relativism, D’Souza writes: “Other cultures are automatically viewed on the same plane as the West; minority groups are entitled to a presumption of moral and intellectual equality with whites; no group, whether blacks in America or aborigines in Australia, can be considered inferior.”

D’Souza makes a horrific error by suggesting that blacks in an urban ghetto are part of a culture seperate from the rest of America. By likening them to aborigines in the outback of Australia, he denies the truth and tragedy of their existence: Inner-city blacks are intimately connected to the culture of American society, influencing it and being influenced by it in turn.

But D’Souza is utterly determined to place poor urban blacks outside the orbit of American civilization. Their lives are governed by barbarism; they are the enemy within. This is wrongheaded. The sociologist Elijah Anderson, reporting on the moral life of poor urban blacks, has stressed again and again that these communities are full of decent people, with values no different from D’Souza’s or my own, who struggle against long odds to live in dignity. Of course pathology lurks there — and it is a uniquely American pathology.

The youth movement of the 1960s, with its celebration of drugs and sex, and its cult of irresponsibility, was no invention of black culture. For example, the huge demand for cocaine in this country can hardly be taken as an expression of the uncivilized tastes of the ghetto poor. With suburban whites buying more rap music than ghetto blacks, with the purveyors of jeans and sneakers betting billions on their ability to move the urban market this way or that, with radical feminists, gay activists, and liberal jurists exerting their influence for better or worse on the context in which all American families now function, how would the question even arise in our society as to whether “minority groups are entitled to moral equality with whites”?

Lest the reader misunderstand, I share D’Souza’s rejection of the political program of the civil rights leadership. I agree that affxrmative action must go, that behavioral problems in the ghetto must be confronted, that discrimination is no longer the primary obstacle to black progress, and that the idealism and moral authority of the hisorice crusade against racism have en squandered by liberal activists over the past three decades. But I reject, wholeheartedly and with intense fervor, his effort to draw a moral line down through the heart of my country, placing those he deems civilized on one side, and leaving the barbaric to the other. Is it not a measure of the quality of American civilization that so many of our “brothers and sisters,” of all colors, live amidst squalor, in hopelessness and despair? D’Souza has not one useful word to say about how this problem will be remedied beyond urging blacks in the middle class to get busy raising the “civilizational standards” of their brethren.

As someone who has spent a decade calling for moral leadership within the black community, I find it now an even more important task to urge that responsible moral leadership come forth in the “conservative community.” This book is not even close to what is required. Racial discourse in America has too often been a kind of public theater — sometimes tragedy, sometimes farce. Far from deriving the principles by means of which progress might be sought, The End of Racism turns out to be only the latest tragicomic performance in asemingly endless repertory.

Glenn C. Loury is University of Professor and Professor of Economics at Boston University and the author most recently of One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviewa on Race and Responsibility in America (Free Press).