BOOK REVIEW: Lab-Grown Pseudo Intellectual.

 

The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, Dinesh D'Souza (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

 

If you have the good fortune to be a cab driver in the city, imagine your added fortune: you see Dinesh D'Souza waiting for a cab. He is impeccably dressed in a Dartmouth jacket, the American Heritage Foundation, tie, the general convent educated and Brooks brothers polished look about him. By his own admission, this is not how criminals dress. So he is not a criminal. He needs to go the posh restaurant that you have only seen the outside of.

 

You couple pick him up, but there is a problem. You knew his type. In the twenty short minutes he is likely to spend in your cab, he cannot keep his well honed mouth shut. He knows you immigrant type. He can see the issues of ethnic magazines on your front seat, a picture of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, or Omar Sheriff as Che Guevara (the guy looks great, you don't know who that is).

 

He smells the air about you, a proud immigrant was has an attitude about the world. He senses your defeated feelings toward your skin color, your general approach toward being one of regular receivers of racism. You think that is why you ended up in the cab in the first place.

 

You know that if he gets in he will preach for a solid twenty minutes the virtues of giving up what he calls your paranoia about racism. He will fill your ears with the new stuff from the American Enterprise Institute and the cultural wing of the Newt Gingrich party. You are a sensible person. You don't deserve that after sixteen hours of nerve-wrecking driving in the midst of dissolving social order.

 

So, in the great tradition of Enlightenment, your deeper demons work through and you apply a rational way of discriminating against Mr. D'souza. You feel sorry for the guy, he is your countryman. But knowing what he might do to you, you avoid him and go for the WASPy Wall Street type male in the background eager to be picked up.

 

Your conscience bites you. This is discrimination based on personal prejudice, enforced in charge of by you as a person in charge of your own economic enterprise. Here's the relief. Mr. D'Souza writes you a letter addressed to your license plate. He feels bad personally, but he applauds your sense of "rational discrimination."

 

Welcome to the world of laboratory grown, hybrid intellectuals.  Rational Slavery

 

The End of Racism is a fascinating book in the way that Leni Riefenstahl's films were fascinating. It is book written by an ideologue, whose grocery and furniture bills are paid by the American Enterprise Institute, a Conservative Think Tank that is pumping the thought fertilizer for the New Conservative/Moral Revolution in this country.

 

Read the book and you would be led to believe as if the Twentieth century happened as a series of mistakes: liberation and the Civil Rights Movements were big noisy clunks in an otherwise orderly process.

 

D'Souza's book is a formidable volume (556 pages of test plus 144 pages of bibliographic notes). It wishes to carry the weight in its research and reference skills as well. It is full of quick quotes from everyone who can be pressed into service to provide the writer with some credibility for his views, which are not different from nay wanna-be candidate in the Republican Party. It has the air of scholarly achievement, and the language is simple and straightforward fro any radio talk show host to understand.

 

The book isn't doing well. It has not been noticed by the sales machines of the big bookstores. His Conservatives colleagues have been silent on its appeal and achievements. It is note one of the notable books of the year. Yet, the book has the value of presenting some of the dominant ideas about racism, affirmative action, Civil Rights, economic freedom and "rational discrimination" in a way that could prove to be quite formative for the public debate of the less competent and more vocal participants in our time.

 

D'Souza believes slavery was an economic idea, not a racist one. Since there were other cultures around the world that practiced slavery, he doesn't see any point in beating up on White slave owners for their doings alone.

 

D'Souza finds Blacks particularly ill-suited to understand the benefits of slavery. According to D'Souza, the two primary institutions of Black life, the family and the church, were revived and strengthened by slavery. That is not enough; the particular style and ethos that is identified with the Black culture today owes its distinctiveness to the experience of slavery. D'Souza goes so far as to say that the "breakdown" in the Black family (with Moynihan as the Guru of this idea) started after the disappearance of slavery. Figure this one out yourself.  Redefined Reality

 

D'Souza hates racism. Remember, this book purports to "end racism." He does not agree with his lunchmate at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Charles Murray, whose The Bell Curve (reviewed in Little Indian in December 1994) claims that Blacks are genetically incapable of participating in our competitive, virtue and intelligence based society. D'Souza believes that it is not the genes, but the liberals and their failed policies that we have to blame for the state of Black America.

 

He leaves aside the notion that we have to build a society sensitive to colors of the skin. He then takes up another idea. That is "culture." For him, it is a dubious term. He decries cultural relativism, partially because in an economic world, that does not make practical sense.

 

On the other hand, "culture" is a fixed formation for D'Souza. He speaks of a Black culture as if it is written and inscribed permanently. It is different from a much better form of the "white" European culture in the United States.

 

This a clever and manipulative idea. Conservatives like to quote Martin Luther King about how one should judge others on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. The emphasis here is on the color of the skin. It is an invitation to establish a "colorblind" society.

 

Only those who benefit from such an idea would vouch for a society that disregards the color of the skin. There are those whose skin color cannot afford them either the luxury or the experience to imagine that their social environment is color-blind. However much they wished it, color is a reality in all endeavors.

 

D'Souza wants to promote the idea that in the color-blind and purely merit-sensitive society, we would inevitably consider the content of the character.

 

Perhaps the best way to read D'Souza's ruminations on culture and his renouncing of the idea of race is to put this book next to Franz Fanon's essay, "Racism and Culture" in Toward the African Revolution. In that unforgettable essay, Fanon has the fortitude and the foresight to see people like D'Souza who wish to dissolve the concept of race because it has become too burdensome for them. Instead, they redefine reality with the concept of culture.

 

In that process of redefinition, Fanon warns, racism is built as cement in a building. Racism against Louis Armstrong becomes tolerable under his Black music, which is at once a pleasant cultural form.

 

D'Souza is an exact test-example for Fanon. In his ever-condescending and ever-patronizing attitude and his continuing obsession to see the social ills only in terms of racism against Blacks, he present himself as a hired intellectual recolonizing his deep seated attitudes into some theory of culture. The End of Racism, as Fanon would say, valorizes culture to bring back racism.  Repulsive Tone

 

With this awakening, the book acquires a repulsive tone to it. D'Souza has the academic skill to examine the ideas of the opponents produced in the form of a self-critique and then he isolates them to support his argument against them. Thus, he argues with liberals and Marxists that race is a socially constructed idea. He quotes generously Henry Louis Gates, Tzvetan Todorov and Naomi Zack on this idea and then presses it into service against the Afrocentrists (who claim a distinctiveness for their culture) and liberals (who want to establish social programs for Blacks to correct social and historical injustices against them). He takes numerous calls within the Black community for hard work and self-responsibility and turns them against Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights leaders for pursuing programs for exclusive benefits.

 

One of D'Souza insights has to do with the dominance of economic considerations over racial or even cultural ones. After a while, this analysis becomes so simplistic that simple minds may not have a choice but to hate liberals and Civil Rights leaders.

 

The separate bathrooms during the pre-Civil Rights era, D'Souza argues, were not popular amongst business owners because single bathrooms were economically more efficient than separate ones. It is easy to imagine the effectiveness of this economic logic and some business owners may have thought so at the time. But to extrapolate from this the idea that the government regulation (by stupid liberals, who else?) brought about this discrimination in the South is to be either cynically manipulative or to be pathetically naive about the reality of racism at that time.

 

On pure economic terms one could see how in the total game of maintaining the overheads economically efficient, the business owners may combine the low cost of Black employees against the "high" cost of maintaining separate restrooms. Also, to think that business practices take place outside of social influence or that business practices could determine the social behavior of people is to imagine that the real world exists as a neat textbook, or that social influence is just one of those annoying variables that can be controlled at will.  Forgetting History

 

By extension, D'Souza deplores, the affirmative action programs, which are based on the recognition of the employee's race. He has admitted that he himself was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but he says that does not make him like the idea that access should be regulated in such a way that socially disadvantaged people be considered more deserving when their merit puts them on par with everyone else.

 

He thinks that the emergence of a Black upper or middle class over the past thirty years is proof that affirmative action is not necessary. These people have won their rightful place despite favorable "quota" system which encourages people to believe that the system is poised to give a free ride to the less competent.

 

It does not occur to him that if it were not for affirmative action program, he would not have the luxury to ask for its dissolution after reaping benefits from it and that the Black middle class would not know what that place upper level of social leader is without the film initial steps of affirmative action.

 

What is the solution to this dilemma? How could we get rid of a race-based society where we seem to be incapable of addressing the wrongs done by the ancestors? Whites would rather forget the history because it is too troublesome. Blacks can not forget the history because it is a heavy reality on their shoulders.

 

D'Souza solution, seemingly derived from the mistaken interpretation of "personal is political" slogan of liberals is to produce a cafe au lait society. Yes, he is asking for mixed marriages across races! It is unclear how this could cure us of a need for rational discrimination, which is based on reasoned evaluation of situation that requires discrimination. Somehow, D'Souza looked at his daughter of mixed race (he is married to a white American) and saw a key to the future problems of a multiracial society.

 

Before we evaluate the complex psychoanalytic underpinnings of this decision, we would like to know how his white colleagues (two Black colleagues resigned after they read this book) take this suggestion for mixing libidos across races.

 

We want to know how this one-sided call from a nonwhite immigrant, who thinks Blacks have a distinctive (communal, rhythmic, melodic) culture, will be taken by whites in this society. And if we have to mix libidos, how would the Conservatives feel about marrying Black women? That is just for the starters.  Slick Talker

 

Dinesh D'Souza's own ethnicity comes into discussion. As an Indian who grew up in Bombay, until a Rotary exchange scholarship brought him here, he is visible and successful. He is a smooth talker and he talks fluently until he meets formidable opponents. Then he squirms and throws well-coined, well-rehearsed one-liners.

 

But given our own "cultural" mindset, it is impossible to not feel "responsible" for this loose canon. One could say that he represses his own "cultural" heritage pretty well. But if we forgive him for his sense of responsibility, one cannot forget in his style and thought a peculiar alienation from the real conditions of real people.

 

He left Bombay in a cab that was happy to take him to the airport. The cabby had heavy tinted glasses. The social reality from either Colaba or West Bandra was intact in that cab. Ever since, he seems to have suffered from the phenomenon of "groupthink" at the Conservative think tanks and a Republican White House.

 

This book, very much like his earlier bestseller, Illiberal Education, shows remarkably well maintained isolation from the real world. The sorry part is that he will continue to do well with that isolation. The syntax of his thought and his speech is not likely to be broken so long as he moves from one talk show to another, one easy interviewers to another, one well-funded project to another.

 

It would be a welcome change if his ideas showed some signs of belonging to the real conditions in which people live, enjoy and suffer. Then, he would think about the "end of racism" in a different way.

 

 

 

Ethnic NewsWatch © SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT[1]

[1]

aShekhar Deshpande, BOOK REVIEW: Lab-Grown Pseudo Intellectual, Little India, 31 Jan 1996, pp. PG.