A PROVOCATIVE POSE / THE AUTHOR SAYS `THE END OF RACISM' IS

INTENDED TO PROMOTE UNDERSTANDING / HIS DETRACTORS SAY PHOOEY.

BY FRED BRUNING. STAFF WRITER

AT A DESK in his publisher's office, Dinesh D'Souza makes a new entry on

a sheet of letter-sized paper divided and subdivided into small

rectangles - so many boxes that it appears D'Souza may have been

dreaming he was Mondrian.

He has filled several pages in this fashion and explains the grid

system is just a technique for logging phone messages, a great many

calls, indeed. As author of a controversial book on race relations,

D'Souza is much in demand - maybe because of the Simpson verdict and

Million Man March, or maybe because race is always a hot ticket in

America, and because, for the moment, the provocative D'Souza is seen by

some as a scalper promising the best seats in the house.

Of course, you take your chances dealing with unbonded agents, and

D'Souza's many critics say the guy is just a kind of sociological

hustler - this year's Charles Murray of "Bell Curve" fame - and that

instead of providing piercing insight into the nation's racial woes, he

delivers little more than an obstructed view of reality.

No matter how many times D'Souza asserts that he wrote "The End of

Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society" to promote understanding,

detractors say, phooey, he wrote it to promote himself. They say his

allegedly lofty intentions are betrayed by the harsh, provocative,

overstated language and broad-based observations D'Souza applies to

poor, black Americans and their communities.

What about chapter titles like "Ignoble Savages?" and "Uncle Tom's

Dilemma," they ask? What about the reference to inner city streets

being "irrigated with alcohol, urine and blood," and D'Souza's claim

that African-Americans are "uniquely fortunate" to have been born in a

country that ultimately abolished the system of slavery that snared

their ancestors?

Or his statement that slave personalities ("playful Sambo," "sullen

'field nigger,' " "dependable Mammy") are still "recognizable" today? Or

the idea that biology-based racism largely has been supplanted by a

benign and "rational" strain of discrimination (as when cabbies bypass

young black men) that has more to do with perceived danger than hateful

assumptions?

"You want your book to sell," said Glenn Loury, a black economist at

Boston University. "You do something that may be damaging to the country

as a whole." A moment later, Loury, who, quit his advisory post with the

conservative, Washington-based American Enterprise Institute think tank

over the institute's support of the book, rethought the question of

whether this particular volume really could deal America a serious poke

in the eye. "Maybe I exaggerated," he said. "I hope so."

Though Loury and D'Souza, a research fellow at AEI, share some

common ground (both are skeptical of affirmative action, for instance),

the economist thinks his former colleague slanders millions with

inflammatory prose that rarely makes distinctions between blacks who

succeed and those who falter.

"The aspirations of thirty million descendants of slaves is not a

fit subject for that kind of lampooning, ridiculing satirization," Loury

says. "The point is to create a caricature. Why? Why?"

Equally dismayed is Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of politics and

public affairs at Princeton University and author of a new book called

"Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class and the Soul of the

Nation" that is described in publicity material as "counterpoint" to

"The End of Racism." Hochschild said D'Souza's work is "very bad social

science" and does little but aggravate a complicated and tense

situation. She's not sure what D'Souza is up to, Hochschild says, but

adds that, frankly, she wishes the book would just "disappear."

A vanishing act does not seem in D'Souza's repertoire.

It is difficult to imagine a more frighteningly fortuitous time for

the D'Souza debate to be raging. Recent events have dispatched America

on another one of its periodic racial roller coaster rides, and this

time the thrills and spills have been exquisite: stomach-churning,

heart-stopping, head-spinning, the works. Someone hawking a high-profile

book on race - D'Souza's publisher, Free Press, ran off a first

printing of 100,000 copies - could not have hoped for a better

confluence of events.

If D'Souza is guilty as charged - if he is a self-aggrandizing,

right-wing agent provocateur who would write almost anything about race

relations just to ensure his own celebrity and earn a quick buck -

then the courteous, bespectacled, cappuccino-colored young man in tie

and shirtsleeves proves a disappointing despot.

In conversation, D'Souza, 34, a native of India who gained U.S.

citizenship in 1991, comes across as calm, confident and resilient

enough to endure the assault of those outraged by his ideas.

Asked, for example, what accounts for his keen interest in racial

matters, D'Souza, whose last book, "Illiberal Education," was a

best-selling examination of the culture wars on college campuses,

portrayed himself as sort of a brakeman on a runaway freight who had no

choice but to put his shoulder into the lever despite the terrible

shriek and shower of sparks sure to follow.

"I really sensed that on no subject in America was there more

euphemism, prevarication, just outright dishonesty, than on race,"

D'Souza said in his soft and easy way. "I've always believed this was

unhealthy and strengthened the hands of the demagogues on the right and

left - that it strengthens the hands of both the David Dukes and the

Farrakhans of this world." In such a distressing situation, D'Souza

said, the Dukes and Farrakhans are exalted as oracles. "They become the

true, clear-eyed diagnosticians of the real world when everyone else is

talking in pieties."

D'Souza knows very well that some critics would add him to the list

of phony soothsayers:

- An essay in Time magazine titled "The Bigot's Handbook" urged

readers to boycott "The End of Racism."

- Robert Woodson, a black conservative who quit the American

Enterprise Institute with Loury because of D'Souza, calls "The End of

Racism" "degrading" and even "Fuhrmanesque," according to the Wall

Street Journal.

- A review in The New Yorker labeled the D'Souza analysis as

"strange and screwy" and his policy declarations - which include

banning certain provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act - as nothing

short of "ominous."

But D'Souza has plenty of supporters, too. A book jacket blurb by

Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights

Coalition, proclaims the book "powerful, searing, honest and

definitive." The revered black economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover

Institution said the work was "must reading," and Republicans on Capitol

Hill are said to be delighted by "The End of Racism" and its potential

for combating affirmative action.

Fundamental to D'Souza's argument is that liberal thought has

conspired to bring Americans to the "hostile divide" that separates

blacks and whites. Liberals were on the right track in the 1960s when

they sought to overturn the vestiges of biology-based racism but since

have steadfastly ducked the sad truth: that public accommodations laws

and preferential treatment cannot raise a people from despair and may,

in fact, provide a rationale for continued dysfunction. By persisting,

the left only has excused the self-defeating behavior exhibited by

errant blacks - a disastrous mistake, in the view of D'Souza.

To make his point, the author embarked on a discussion of track and

field. "If groups are equal in their ability and potential and talents

and you put them all on the same line and have them run a race, they

obviously are going to hit the finishing tape at the same time," D'Souza

said during an interview in Manhattan at The Free Press, which also

published "The Bell Curve." "They have the same inherent abilities.

"Then you have the empirical reality that that's not so -

equality of rights does not lead to equality of results. And you have

two responses to that.

"The liberal response is, `Well, if equality of rights doesn't lead

to equality of results, racism must simply have migrated underground and

now expresses itself in the very rules of the game.' In other words, the

race may be suddenly rigged in some way. Therefore, let's manufacture

the results to produce the preordained equality of results. That's

basically affirmative action."

He continued: "I'm saying that the race is fair but blacks are not

running as well as other groups as a result of their circumstances,

historically. To continue my analogy - lack of coaching, lack of

nutrition, lack of know-how with playing by the rules of the game.

"This is the cultural legacy of oppression. So I'm actually giving a

lot of ground to the liberal view because I admit that black culture is

a product of white oppression. But I'm saying that this black culture

has taken on a life of its own . . . "

Does D'Souza consider white culture superior to black?

In usual fashion, D'Souza answered as readily as if asked perhaps

to share a family recipe or state his musical tastes (he enjoys Mozart,

by the way, and "light" rock - though he couldn't think of any

favorite tunes - and a little bit of country, too, specifically, Emmy

Lou Harris). Race may be volatile subject matter, but D'Souza, who has

been on the grill since his days as a fiercely conservative student

editor at Dartmouth College, demonstrates the abandon of a stuntman

about to dive through a ring of fire.

"Black American culture is, on the average, inferior to white

American culture for the purposes of achieving success as it is defined

in America today," he says. "In other words, if you want to write a

legal brief you can't do it in black English.

"Now you have all kinds of linguists who will tell you black English

has its own grammar, it has its own structure, it has its own coherence.

And it's true, if you want to be a rapper, you can do fine with black

English. But if you want to be a lawyer, black English is an obstacle.

You know, Johnnie Cochran didn't deliver his closing statement in black

English.

"So I'm not talking about superiority in the abstract but functional

superiority."

Liberals often contend that entrenched attitudes and unfair policies

prevent blacks from succeeding in the fullest sense of the word - that

even if African-Americans were to perfectly mimic white culture, many

would continue to be at a disadvantage because of latent racism.

To which, D'Souza demands: Get over it.

"The black problem can be solved only through a program of cultural

reconstruction in which society plays a supporting role but which is

carried out primarily by AfricanAmericans themselves . . ." D'Souza

writes. "It is difficult to compel people to admire groups, many of

whose members do not act admirably."

He says many young Americans oppose preferential programs out of a

"sense of fair play" but that older liberals mistakenly see a

"resurgence of racism" instead. Only by abandoning artificial solutions

and disavowing foolish ideas of "cultural relativism" - the notion

that no culture is superior to another - can "the end of racism" be

achieved.

It's the sort of commentary that causes critics like Jennifer

Hochschild to wonder whether D'Souza and she occupy the same land mass.

She says his observations are overblown, "insulting" and bound to

reinforce "angry, hostile separatism on both sides."

"You can't talk about black culture without talking about the

structure of society and distribution of resources more generally,"

Hochschild says. "You have inner cities that have no jobs, schools that

you and I and Dinesh D'Souza would not send our kids to, that have

public housing that is a disgrace, that have hospitals shutting down.

How can you talk about culture without talking about other things?"

Like millions of Americans, D'Souza, indeed, has distanced himself

from the sort of grief Hochschild describes. D'Souza, his wife, Dixie

(the two met while working at the White House for Ronald Reagan in

1988), and the couple's 8-month-old daughter, Danielle, live in suburban

Springfield, Va. - a convenient commute to to AEI offices in

Washington, but a world away from the troubled urban neighborhoods

D'Souza portrays so graphically in "The End of Racism."

That other world surely will exist when D'Souza's daughter begins

asking questions. What will D'Souza tell Danielle about race?

For a moment D'Souza seemed more Daddy than debater.

"I'm going to do my part to create a world where race matters less

and less," D'Souza said. "I think it is difficult today to live in such

a world. Everywhere we go we are asked to check little boxes which

define us racially."

The author says he has faced prejudice in the United States, most of

it, he thinks, based on ignorance of India, and not comparable to the

sort of treatment that infuriates blacks. D'Souza said that as his

daughter matures, "she will think these things through for herself."

A few minutes later, D'Souza excused himself and reached for the

phone. He was booked on a radio talk show in Baltimore and it was air

time. D'Souza sat in silence listening to the broadcast host and then

began again to patiently discuss his thesis. "Tribalism," he said.

"Racism. Ethnocentrism."

He told the host that the Million Man March was essentially

irrelevant - "Isn't it time we realized Washington no longer has the

answers?" - and recalled that on trips to visit relatives in Bombay he

has seen demonstrators lying on railroad tracks to protest low wages as

Indians once did to to oppose British rule. "I say, `What are you

doing?' " The issues have changed, was his point, and tactics must

change, too.

During a lengthy commercial break, D'Souza put down the phone to

accommodate a newspaper photographer. The fellow asked D'Souza to get

out of his chair and sit near a window in yoga-like fashion, but the

author objected.

"Oh, no," D'Souza said. "I don't want some kind of crazy Indian pose

- the sort of Indian sage, cross-legged and sitting on hot coals or

whatever . . . "

The photographer said he had no intention of making an ethnic

statement but needed a shot emphasizing D'Souza's pensive nature.

Convinced he was not being stereotyped, D'Souza tucked his heels under

his legs and told the cameraman to fire away.

[1]

FRED BRUNING, A PROVOCATIVE POSE / THE AUTHOR SAYS `THE END OF RACISM' IS INTENDED TO PROMOTE UNDERSTANDING / HIS DETRACTORS SAY PHOOEY., ALL Ed., Newsday, 2 Nov 1995, pp. B04.