After the horrific shootings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, we are hearing again that America needs to have a national conversation about race. Hillary Clinton seems committed to the idea, as does Barack Obama, despite having been wary of fostering such a perspective during most of his presidency.
Indeed, America needs a new consensus on the relationship between black people and the police. Feeling under siege and in danger of being murdered by appointed peacekeepers is the keystone to black people’s sense that racism permeates life in modern America.
But if America finally engages in this conversation, it would be wise to avoid the ideological distortions, idealizations, and missteps that have characterized previous entreaties for it, and stretched the goals of the conversation far beyond the urgent one of ensuring that people like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile do not die innocently and that we avoid psychopathic revenge assassinations of cops.
Can We Talk About Race? Beverly Daniel Tatum asked in her 2007 book,. “We can have this conversation. We must,” wrote Charles Blow seven years later in a New York Times essay, and many will recall that Bill Clinton tried to formally inaugurate a national dialogue on race during his presidency. An especially common refrain has been that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” that the majority resists this dialogue that has yet to happen.
Until we have that conversation, the mantra has gone, tragic disparities in income, education, employment, and health care will persist between blacks and other Americans. The civil-rights victories of the 1960s, followed by the framing of open bigotry, starting in the 1970s, as morally equivalent to pedophilia, were only a beginning; white America remains “on the hook” not just for the behavior of the police but for black America’s problems in general. Just as much of the work of ancient philosophers like Thomas Aquinas can be understood only through familiarity with the theological doctrines of their times, one needs to understand the assumptions embedded in the “conversation” to comprehend the motivations behind some rather odd thinking about race.
One case in point is Daniel Q. Gillion’s Governing With Words (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a book-length argument that one key to improving life circumstances for people of color is for politicians to talk about race in public statements. This may seem a rather undramatic thesis, as if someone argued that the telephone, email, and texting are central tools for being in touch with a person, or that bathing is a useful strategy for maintaining employment. However, the author’s actual motivation is an argument more specific — and, for all of its good intentions, shaky. Gillion has attempted a statistically based defense of the idea that America is in need of this “conversation.” Ironically, many of his findings undercut his thesis and point to a larger problem with the way educated America now discusses race.
An important moment for Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, was President Clinton’s 1997 Race Initiative, one of the principal goals of which was to “promote a constructive dialogue.” The political scientist Adolph Reed, with typical acerbity, ridiculed the whole affair as “elaborately choreographed pageantry of essentializing yackety-yak” substituting for legislation to relieve the problems suffered by people of color. Gillion, however, argues that the discussion of race plays a crucial part in just what Reed sought. And against those who counsel that race-neutral goals are more politically feasible, Gillion believes that a politician must address race head-on.
“Discursive governance,” he terms the orientation in question. He sees this “governance” (which he contrasts with governing), not as just so much posturing and hot air, but as a vital action in itself because it keeps race-related issues in the public consciousness in preparation for possible legislation over time.
Much of the argumentation Gillion brings to bear is less than stimulating. Few will be surprised that black media sources are where black people often learn what President Obama has said, or that black people’s approval of Obama has risen after he has made prominent statements about race. Often Gillion presents curious statistical blips as significant. Clinton’s initiative had “reverberating effects” because in a subsequent Gallup Poll, the number of people who agreed that race issues are important rose to ... 3 percent. After Clinton’s minority-targeted health initiative, 5 percent of minority-group members thought health issues were important. Data such as these are hard to see as evidence that “discursive governance” yields significant results.
Rather, it is the counterintuitive that is interesting. Gillion is more valuable in demonstrating that in the first years of his presidency, Obama spoke about race less than any Democratic president in recent history, and that he has spoken on race less than Ronald Reagan did during his eight years in office. Obama certainly felt that talking about race would lead critics to assail him as an “angry black president,” and although Gillion strives to ascertain that this fear has been justified, his results actually yield further counterintuitive findings. Approval of Obama’s performance has not only gone down about as much among liberals as among conservatives, but when he has spoken on race his approval ratings have gone up among conservatives just as they have among liberals (possibly because often, as in Ferguson, Mo., and now in Dallas his statements about race have been mild and measured — statements that have struck much of the black punditocracy as weak).
Ladies and gentlemen, in 2016 the time has come to give up on the idea that there will ever be a ‘conversation’ on race in America.
In an experiment, Gillion had two groups of whites express whether they approved or disapproved of Obama’s performance. Beforehand, he had one group read two hypothetical speeches in which the president proposed a national dialogue on race and then explicitly race-targeted legislation. Although both groups included people who disapproved of Obama, more of the speech-readers accused him of race-baiting. We are to take this as revealing that talking about race stirs up the grimier kinds of resentment, but in fact, among the speech-readers, only 5 percent disapproved of him as a race-baiter, contrasted with only 3 percent in the other group.
Of course, Gillion could take these modest effects as an argument that Obama, and by extension other politicians seeking the cover of race-neutral discussion to avoid “stirring that stuff up,” should not fear talking about race directly. He seems to prefer to read the data as indicating a significant public resistance to talking about race, a resistance that must be overcome. Near the end, Gillion states:
“An honest dialogue on racial and ethnic minority concerns is fundamental for racial progress in America. Before we, all members of society contributing to the democratic process, can speak about race we must acknowledge that we have a problem. That is, racial inequality still exists and is at times fueled by racism, discrimination, and bias. We must come to terms with the reality that this problem is unique and different from issues of poverty or class, and acknowledge that the problem of race continues to taint public attitudes and hinder minorities’ upward mobility.”
To wit, Gillion’s “discursive governance” is the “conversation on race” so often called for. However, the words “conversation” and “dialogue” here are euphemistic: The idea is not merely an exchange of views. Gillion’s description is typical in making clear that the goal is less conversation than conversion, less dialogue than diatribe, even if couched in controlled tones: White America needs to be carefully taught that the multitude of problems suffered by black people in this country are the product of subtle but pernicious effects of racism — now institutional or societal rather than overt.
This idea that on race in America there is always a shoe that hasn’t dropped, that a certain vaguely articulated Great Day has yet to come in which whites realize their culpability in black people’s income, health, and educational disparities and in some way act upon it, is the fulcrum of almost all of today’s discussion of, writings about — and in Gillion’s terminology “governance” about — race. The teachings of Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jelani Cobb, Melissa Harris-Perry, Brittney Cooper, Jamelle Bouie, Charles Blow, and legions of other leading voices on race today revolve to a large extent around that assertion.
Here, then, is the motivation for the frequent claim that America “doesn’t want to talk about race” when, as a work like Gillion’s rather neatly confirms, America talks about race obsessively year-round. The Martian anthropologist — or even a sharp 10-year-old — would be baffled by so many brilliant people’s endlessly claiming in the very wake of the latest racial incident, discussed in the news cycle for weeks, that America “doesn’t want to talk about race.” The phrase is a shorthand for what more articulately might be rendered as “America doesn’t want to talk about racism.” The thinkers are more precise in a variation on the phrase, that America is “in denial” about racism, as in, whites refuse to understand their responsibility to make up for what they did to black America for 350 years and still do, to an extent, especially regarding issues of law enforcement.
However, it’s not always clear that these thinkers understand what a radical proposition they are making. Much of the difficulty in convincing whites beyond an educated fringe that they are “on the hook” for black suffering is that, beyond the painfully stark episodes of police brutality, the lines of causation have become so tortuous.
For a white person in the South in 1950 to fail to understand that whites and racism were responsible for black misery would have been disingenuous, to say the least. Today, however, those insisting that this “conversation” needs to take place have had much more than cases like Tamir Rice and Eric Garner in mind. They assert that, for example, if black, urban teenagers are shooting one another by the dozen over petty turf wars (as is the case in, for example, Chicago this summer), then the reason is, on some level, white racism. One might explain further: The boys are killing one another because they lacked male role models growing up, that this was because so many black men in their communities spend long periods in prison, and that this, in turn, is largely because of crimes connected to the drug trade with penalties that have always disproportionately affected black people. One might also say that schools have failed these kids, and that this is because of white flight destroying the tax base in their neighborhood and depriving the schools of money. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his Between the World and Me, ventures, in what we might consider a more artistic vein, that such boys are haunted by the memory of their grandfathers who were lynched.
We need governing not with words, but with words rigorously linked to intended actions. There was a time when this was called activism.
But for better or for worse, this kind of explanation is a tough sell beyond a certain mostly educated and highly sympathetic fringe of the American population. The laws that locked up so many on drug charges were heartily supported by many black leaders. White flight didn’t help inner-city schools one bit, but for decades now they have generally been run by black people in cities with black governments. Meanwhile, the idea that black kids’ actions today are driven by a rage passed on to them in Lamarckian fashion by things that happened to relatives of theirs during the Coolidge administration could be classified as infantilizing if ventured by a white writer.
Quite simply, the conversation argument entails, unsaid but deeply felt, the following: Because of long-ago events, we must not be subject to moral or academic standards as high as those for other people, and can improve our lot beyond a certain point only via a revolutionary upending of societal procedure (such as wealth redistribution, reparations for slavery, and/or legislation explicitly targeting one ethnic group: black people, specifically) and a psychological cleansing of all vestiges of racist bias among whites. Meanwhile, the person who asks at what point a people can no longer use the past as an excuse is treated as a clueless bigot (or, if black, as a revolting race traitor) by those seeking this “conversation.”
Some conversation advocates will claim that I distort their reasoning, but the question is: What else is it that you are hoping this conversation will be about? Again, police brutality is one thing, and needs to be discussed, but “conversation” advocates are calling for much more. Outlining how the conversation should proceed, Charles Blow writes, “We must acknowledge how each of us is, in myriad ways, materially and spiritually affected by a society in which bias has been widely documented to exist.” He encourages as a foundation a statement by the American Anthropological Association that “How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society.”
Certainly an America in which these seismic developments occurred would be a lovely thing. But I am hardly a recreational pessimist to ask just how likely it is that they ever will.
Polite society classifies “the race thing” as a uniquely fraught subject, the discussion of which entails black people venting and whites acknowledging. (A key tenet of the “white privilege” paradigm of late is that white people understand that their role in the discussion is to never challenge, and to accept that the whole affair is “not about you.”) But this acknowledgment alone creates little except more acknowledging. Coates’s searingly angry, hopeless Between the World and Me becomes perhaps the best-selling book on race in American history, but even that yields just a more articulate wave of acknowledging. And meanwhile a sneering, racist blowhard like Donald Trump attracts unprecedented amounts of support from white Americans, not all of them uneducated, and giving little evidence that they will ever be swayed from a basic idea that people need to make the best of what they’ve got and get over the past.
Ladies and gentlemen, in 2016 the time has come to give up on the idea that there will ever be a “conversation” on race in America — either formal or more open-endedly “discursive” — that will lead to any conclusive redress for black America’s grievous past. . Nota bene: This is hardly a call for giving up on the battle against black America’s problems — there must be no more Tamir Rices. However, nothing requires teaching white people that everything that ails black America is because of racism you can’t quite feel, taste, or see but is always nevertheless there.
It has now been 50 years since the Black Power movement arose, 50 years during which many black American thinkers have been hoping for something historically unprecedented: that a defining proportion of the ruling class somehow learns to judge black people as much on the basis of legacy as on their own actions in the here and now. The Great Day has never shown the slightest signs of coming, it is time to admit that it isn’t going to happen. The “conversation” about race is thinking black Americans’ Great Pumpkin. What we have now is all there will ever be.
Gillion believes that this “conversation” he represents as “discursive governance” has been useful, but it has not.
For example, he describes the “beer summit” that Obama and Joe Biden had early in their tenure, a meeting at the White House with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley, the police officer who had arrested Gates on his front porch. Gates had loudly accused Crowley of profiling him, which set off a goodly amount of “conversation” nationwide for a few weeks about problems between black men and the police. The most impressive result of the whole episode was Obama’s roasting by the right wing for calling Crowley’s arrest of Gates “stupid.” Obama’s mere statements on race have created anger and crosstalk, including the famous speech on race during his first campaign, in defense of his attending the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church, with the right accusing him of tarring his white relatives as racist and the left skeptical of his “throwing Wright under the bus” in order to get elected. Obama’s actual leading of the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative has been a much more significant historical action for black people than any amount of discursive governance — as has, it bears mentioning, race-neutral Obamacare.
Black people, then, need no “conversation” that isn’t aimed directly at concrete changes, such as eliminating the war on drugs, teaching poor children how to read according to methods proven scientifically to work, and providing as many women as possible with long-acting reversible contraceptives. That is, black America needs policy, not psychological revolution. All of those things could happen in an imperfect America where no “conversation” has taken place, where nonblacks continue to eat their hot dogs on the Fourth of July without a thought of what happened to black people in the past (a scenario that irritates Coates), where whites in psychological tests reveal themselves to have ugly little biases against black faces as opposed to white ones, where Donald Trump continues to pretend not to know what David Duke’s feelings about black people are, and where, in general, black people, like everyone else, grapple with a grievously less than perfect nation and try their best.
Hillary Clinton need not, and should not, think of the deaths in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas as an occasion to foster a national dialogue “about race.” She should foster a national dialogue about making it so that cops don’t kill so many innocent black people, and about pathways toward legislation for a few other goals. Neither she, nor any conversation, can fix the past, eradicate all racist sentiment, or create a populace refulgently enlightened about black America’s story. That’s a dream it’s time to let go of.
That calls to get real things done rather than to hope for whites to “really understand” are now seen as uncharitable and backward is a testament to how deeply the post-Black Power ideology has permeated the consciousnesses of those seeking to create change for black America. In reference to Gillion’s title, we need governing not with words, but with words rigorously linked to intended actions. There was a time when this was called activism, in contrast to what could aptly be called lexicalism — or, in its way, discursive governance.
John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
