George Will, a political pundit who you might see on ABC’s Face the Nation, once wrote a column entitled ”Racial Balancing in Seattle Schools” in which he disparaged the school districts’ decision to open the doors of their best schools to minority students based on insights regarding institutional racism. Mr. Will took direct aim at the justification for these policies, concluding, “The Supreme Court deference to such race-mongering would make a mockery of the equal protection guarantee.”
Wow. This is sad mainly because Mr. Will is a significant player in MSM. He has such a large audience and generally does what he can to keep people from really considering how institutional racism occurs and what they can to constructively remedy the inequities that result.
To get a better sense of how race issues are playing out in today’s heated political climate, read Mr. Will’s latest column assessing how Obama Transcends Racial Confinements. Read the whole column if you can, but here’s a key snippet where Mr. Will equates black intellectualism with perversity:
Steele has brilliantly dissected the intellectual perversities that present blacks as dependent victims, reduced to trading on their moral blackmail of whites who are eager to be blackmailed in exchange for absolution. But Steele radically misreads Obama, missing his emancipation from those perversities. Obama seems to understand America’s race fatigue, the unbearable boredom occasioned by today’s stale politics generally, and especially by the perfunctory theatrics of race.
Of course, I had to post a reply about Mr. Will’s and Mr. Obama’s differing diversionary tatics:
Obfuscation Warning!!!
Mr. Will does what he does best: that is, he dismisses the ‘intellectual’ position as baseless, and encourages you to misrecognize the superficial as sound reasoning. This is a kind of obfuscation.
For those of you intrepid enough to be more critical about the ‘racial landscape’, who like to form your own opinions based on evidence and sound logic rather than media storyline, I challenge you to dig past political correctness and consider the sources of frustration that many blacks feel in the places where they live.
Empirical Fact: Blacks live in the most polluted areas in the United States.
Example: Consider how pollution occurs in some places and not others. Reflect on the history of industrial development policies in E. St. Louis, think about capital disinvestment and white flight, the dramatic decrease in property values and loss of tax revenue, and the inability of communities to provide quality educational services to their children. Think about these empirical facts and then come up with a theory about what might be happening in places like E. St. Louis.
Conservative pundits would rather that you blithely refrain from open discussions of the sort above and continue to uncritically assume that arguments about social injustices posited by black intellectuals are nothing more than the crude, unfounded expressions of men and women mired in laziness and the self-frustrations of their own making. Why else does Mr. Will highlight Mr. Steele’s “brilliant dissection” of how blacks “adopt a morally stunting stance of accusation against white society”? Reread that part and tell me what he is up to as a columnist. In my opinion, he highlights Mr. Steele’s rather uncritical assumptions simply to divert your attention away from the empirical facts and logic of black identity politics. In essence, Mr. Will would simply have you dismiss the political stances of “angry Black Americans” as “intellectual perversities”.
If you are White or Black, or some other God-given hue, I trust you’ve got the Grey matter to see how in the case of E. St. Louis that environmental disparities are real, and how inequities affect everyday people (read Kozol’s Savage Inequaltities to see what it is like going to school in E. St. Louis). In fact, I trust that you can be intellectual enough to assemble the empirical facts together, question assumptions like “dem peoples jest don’t werk hard enough,” and come around to the realization that environmental racism occurs subtly at a distance and over time through negligent, unthoughtful industrial development policies, and even more to the point, that there are constructive ways that we as citizens can repair the inequities in our cities.
The environmental racism, a kind of institutional racism, which was described above, is only an example of the kind of black identity politics that Mr. Will likes to misread to his audience. What Mr. Will doesn’t get yet, at least in my view, is that the Senator from Illinois is all about black identity politics.
Remember, Obama lives in S. Chicago; and that, of course, is significant to his political awareness. Mr. Will is probably right in so far as Obama has cast off the “perfunctory theatrics of race,” realizing that Americans are less likely to hand over the reigns of power to an angry black politician spouting off the mechanisms by which blacks are being oppressed. Those “intellectual” arguments, though empirically substantive, are typically lost on conservative voters and others who are opposed to social change. No, the crafted message is “HOPE” – hope that we can better ourselves by caring for our neighbors across the street and more importantly those across town. Hope is America at its best; it’s a good Christian sentiment too. It’s also a message that social conservatives can even appreciate despite the self-interest that so often drives their “anti-intellectual” politics. So in case you haven’t realized it yet, this is another kind of obfuscation, a good kind, a kind which even conservative pundits like George Will are willing to get behind. So kudos to the calm, serious Senator from Illinois.
Rather than transcending racial confinements, it’s probably more apt to say Sen. Obama has so far side-stepped the counter-logics of dominant conservative politics, which is vehemently opposed to public policies that threaten the status quo of race relations, e.g. the “race-mongering” policies of the Seattle school district.
Posted by Doxic 
