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The Race Card
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19956 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
3,655 Words |
| Author
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Charles Sykes
Charles Sykes' latest book, A Nation of Victims, will be
published in September by St. Martin's Press. He is the
author of Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher
Education and The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in
Higher Education. |
TWO NATIONS
Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
Andrew Hacker
New York: Basic Books, 1992
257 pp., $24.95
Blacks once were slaves, Andrew Hacker reminds us. Even today, they "subsist as aliens" in their own country, which he compares somewhat unfavorably to South Africa. Although lacking the legal sanctions, "America's version of apartheid . . . comes closest to the system even now being reformed in the land of its invention." It is thus unfair to expect blacks to succeed without a result-oriented, government-led "politics of race."
That, in sum, is the massage of this curious book: that blacks are, after all, victims, and that every social problem besetting them can be explained only if we examine it though the lens of race.
Although Two Nations is being hailed as setting a new racial agenda, it is intellectually a successor to William Ryan's Blaming the Victim, which argued in the early 1970s that being a victim of racism meant never having to say you're sorry or suffering the consequences of your misdeeds. Even in the cases of men who fathered illegitimate children or deserted their families, there was always someone else to blame. With considerable vigor, Ryan argued that crime, joblessness, poverty, and illegitimacy had nothing to do with the values or the conduct of individuals--they all were products of white racism.
Twenty years later, Andrew Hacker picks up the theme.
Whites begin subduing and slaughtering nonwhite natives and enslaving and oppressing blacks in the first paragraph of Hacker's book. And they don't leave off until the last page. Any progress that may have been made in race relations over the last few decades is minimized or denied altogether, and every victimist canard is rehearsed there once again--from the suspicion that inner-city drug use is part of a white plot, to the Afrocentrist notion that black children learn "differently," to the politically correct doctrine that traditional curriculums reflect a white Eurocentric "hegemony" in the schools.
Hacker's book is curious not because it resurrects this victims mythos, but because it does so as if the author is oblivious to much of the social debate that has
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