Unjust, page 7
“Why is there a black ghetto in every city in the United States?” the historian Craig Steven Wilder asks mournfully. “The answer is public policy.”23
The Dream Declined
By the 1960s, the identity consciousness that developed in the early 1900s had matured into a political force. So much so, in fact, that it came to define the period: the civil rights era.
In the mid-twentieth century, identity consciousness gave rise to political crusades including black empowerment, feminism, the gay rights movement, and many others. Today’s Black Lives Matter movement is one of those convention-challenging phenomena. It arose naturally around high-profile episodes of over-policing in African-American neighborhoods and is, in many ways, the progeny of the identity politics movements of the twentieth century that unquestionably moved America closer to the ideals of its founding. It continues to challenge the conscience of the United States and compel us to ask discomfiting questions about our society.
What has led to disproportionate rates of incarceration and wrongful conviction among African-Americans? Studies suggest that education levels are strong predictors of whether someone will be incarcerated in his lifetime. So what factors are preventing some from reaching the educational level at which incarceration rates decline? Is this entirely about individual responsibility, or are there environmental factors? What are the effects of economic inequality on social mobility? Of discrimination? Can those discriminated against also be discriminatory themselves? Can identity ever be divorced from the pursuit of true equality?
These are important questions, and Black Lives Matter deserves credit for raising them. But Black Lives Matter is not immune to the conditions that transform civil libertarian movements into illiberal movements.
In October 2017, for example, students affiliated with Black Lives Matter at the College of William and Mary in Virginia crashed an event headlined by the ACLU’s Claire Guthrie Gastañaga. They were not interested in a dialogue. “ACLU, you would protect Hitler too,” the demonstrators yelled. “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution,” others added. “Liberalism is white supremacy.”24 When illiberal activists tell you exactly who they are in no uncertain terms, it is wise to believe them.
The demonstrators carried on for twenty minutes before one of them was finally handed a microphone, into which a student disgorged a list of demands. Following that, the demonstrators surrounded Gastañaga. They shouted over both her and her inquiring audience members and eventually forced the event to disband.
For most of the history of the United States, social justice—even the branch of it tinged with paranoia and identity obsession—was focused on ensuring that minorities were able to achieve the American dream. At some point in the progression of American scholarship, a toxic idea sank its hooks into the minds of the intelligentsia. Suddenly, the activist class went from fighting for the American dream to determining that it was unattainable—at least by minorities. Non-white Americans, devotees of a non-Western religion, women, gays and lesbians, the transgendered, and anyone else who is neither male, white, nor straight cannot reach their full potential—not in a nation as deviously bigoted as the United States. Those who don’t agree are only improperly educated.
In his 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution, Bruce Bawer describes the philosophy of Eden Torres, a professor of gender and Chicano studies at the University of Minnesota, for whom the success of her students is an obstacle to instilling in them a revolutionary consciousness. “As far as she’s concerned, the American dream was, and is, an illusion. The problem, she explains, is that they simply don’t recognize ‘Western cultural imperialism’ when they see it.”
“She tells us about one of her Latino students who lamented—yes, lamented—that he’d never experienced racism,” he continued. “She makes it clear that she finds this preposterous: of course he’d experienced racism; he just hadn’t recognized it as such.”25
Hostility toward the notion that a better life is attainable insofar as one’s talents and determination allow is not limited to the identity-fixated activist left. It also extends to left-leaning policymakers. “To a large extent, the American Dream is a myth,” Joseph Stiglitz has insisted. The Nobel prize–winning economist, former World Bank chief, and Columbia University professor clearly wasn’t speaking from experience.
In 2015, at the height of the Democratic Party’s fixation with the scourge of “income inequality,” as though income equality had ever existed or would have been desirable, Stiglitz’s dreary assertion was warmly welcomed by the usual suspects. “America is no longer the land of opportunity that it (and others) like to think it is,” he wrote. “In terms of income inequality, American lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride.”26
Explore the universe of liberal opinion, and you will find plenty of provocative assertions that, in essence, the United States is a fetid sewer of corruption, racism, and economic stagnation. The only thing keeping Americans from recognizing and rebelling against their abhorrent conditions is their naïve refusal to accept that social mobility is unattainable in an exploitative, prejudiced, ruthlessly capitalistic society like ours.
The pervasive notion that the American Dream is at best a zero-sum game and at worst a fantasy has extended to those who occupy the other end of the social justice spectrum. Following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, an industry sprouted up around the notion that impoverished white residents of the Rust Belt and Appalachia are the victims of some cosmic injustice. They are not masters of their own destinies; something horrible has been done to them. Whether Trump-supporting denizens of the American interior believe that themselves is immaterial. They have been told that they believe it by the sociological taxonomists who parachuted into their towns to classify this strange new species: the Trump voter.
In her book on conservatives in the American heartland, Arlie Russell Hochschild insists that “the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream” transformed what we once called Tea Partiers into “strangers in their own land.” These Americans were “afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line,” and they wanted revenge.27 Even J. D. Vance’s wildly successful memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is often described as an autopsy on upward social mobility in Middle America. The Aspen Institute has described Vance’s book as “an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.” Never mind that Vance himself—a man born into poverty who enlisted in the Marine Corps, graduated from an Ivy League law school, and became a bestselling author—is the embodiment of that dream.
“The Dream thrives on generalizations, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers,” the celebrated liberal essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his 2015 bestseller, Between the World and Me. “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” Framed as a series of letters to his teenage son imparting the author’s experiences as a black man in America, his book is an expansive rumination on the untold history of the United States from the Civil War to the present day, and it arrives at a sour verdict on the nation.
“The Dream,” Coates concludes contemptuously, is a mirage that compels minorities to look past the structures of oppression that surround them. “The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs,” he wrote, “but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream.”28
Coates is seeking to inculcate in his son the apprehension that “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.” And if anyone who is not a member of this oppressive, white-led power structure achieves anything in his life, that becomes an impediment to reaching the liberating consciousness that comes with accepting that his successes are not truly his own. “This is the foundation of the Dream,” Coates asserts, “its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works.”
Born in Baltimore in 1975 to a Vietnam War veteran and a teacher, Coates was by no means destined for success. Despite their suspicion toward the United States, his parents instilled in Coates values and a work ethic that served him well in his career as a journalist and, eventually, a celebrated writer. By the age of forty-two, Coates was the author of several books and graphic novels, which he wrote when he wasn’t working as The Atlantic’s national correspondent. Coates received a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship grant and the 2014 George Polk Award for Commentary, among other accolades. He also preaches that the American dream is a fraud.
The Engine of Equality
Democratic analysts are not mistaken when they identify a recent decline in upward economic mobility. There are several reasons for this decline, notably among them the erosion of the nuclear family.
In 2012, the poverty rate among families with children headed by single mothers was more than 40 percent.29 As the Brookings Institution’s Aparna Mathur writes, single parenthood is “highly correlated with children’s high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy rates and men’s labor force participation rates.”30 This is an instinctive truth that you don’t need to be especially perceptive to deduce yourself. Anyone who has seen in person what life is like in both two- and single-parent households wouldn’t argue with that conclusion. It is, though, strangely controversial among a certain class of activists. This is not the only unassailable truth from which tragically earnest social justice advocates recoil.
Economic mobility in the United States has slowed since the collapse of the mortgage market in 2008, which was itself the result of a misguided public sector effort to legislate economic equality. When Bill Clinton unveiled the National Homeownership Strategy in 1995, he dedicated it to those who “were trying to build their own personal version of the American dream.”31 By underwriting loans to families who could not afford or “were excluded” from homeownership, the government under Clinton and later George W. Bush inflated a bubble. When it burst, it ushered in the longest-lived recession in modern times.
Amid all the associated benefits, globalization and the end of the Cold War posed fiscal as well as geopolitical challenges to the United States. The Great Recession only made those ordeals worse. To assume, however, that hardship and privation are the permanent state of affairs in America is to ignore the nation’s character and history.
A fair reading of the American story must concede that this nation has struggled and often failed to live up to the lofty ideals expressed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. But that same fairness would lead most to acknowledge that the United States has made remarkable strides toward racial, social, and economic equality in the space of 240 years—strides that are unrivaled by any other culturally heterogeneous nation in any similar span of human history.
This is good news, but good news is often regarded as a display of profound ignorance by the arbiters of political discourse. Those who have endured discrimination (and reverse discrimination) contend not infrequently that these and other empirical observations are dangerous, not because they’re untrue but because they fail to advance a particular narrative. Imperfect as it is, America remains the most potent force for achieving social and economic equality that man has ever devised. Often, that reality is denied by those who fancy themselves equality’s fiercest advocates. This is hardly the only indisputable fact that irritates the social justice movement to no end.
CHAPTER 3
Truths and Transgressions
Perhaps the simplest method for distinguishing classical liberals from militant social justice advocates is the extent to which the latter are threatened by the articulation of challenging ideas. The members of this movement tend to share a suspicion of certain forms of expression, exposure to which they believe is dangerous. Specifically, the expression of some empirical observations that refute their most cherished assumptions.
Increasingly, social justice advocates on the left and the right believe their counterparts are prone to genetic stereotyping. And they’re both right. Purporting to protect vulnerable people from dangerous ideas—ideas that may be deeply offensive, threatening, or, even worse, alluring—social justice advocates have adopted a set of dogmas that bear a suspicious resemblance to the biological determinism they supposedly abhor.
Often, the developments that most agitate social justice advocates are entirely beneficial, particularly those that suggest progress toward racial and economic equality. Even making note of progress is evidence of ignorance or, worse, some malign effort to undercut the logic that reinforces their shared conclusions about America’s fundamentally repressive nature. From improving race relations to the march toward equality of the sexes to the success of the melting pot, the United States is making headway every day. That truth is undeniable, and for some reason social justice activists passionately resent it.
Dangerous Speech
Some, like Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and governor of Vermont, have endorsed the notion that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech.” Unfortunately for Dean and his hypercritical compatriots, the entire Supreme Court disagrees.
In 2011, Simon Tam—the Asian-American leader of an Asian-American rock band—tried to register the name of his group, The Slants, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Tam contended that his band’s name neutralizes a common racial epithet for Asians. It was an attempt to “reclaim” the hurtful stereotype. That reclamation would have to wait.
Registration was denied under the Lanham Act, which excludes from trademark protection “matter which may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” Tam sued and won. “Whatever our personal feelings about the mark at issue here,” the federal court of appeals ruled, “the First Amendment forbids government regulators to deny registration because they find the speech likely to offend others.”1
The case went to the nation’s highest court, which came to the same conclusion. “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion, “but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,’ ”2 quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who observed that, even in tumultuous times, America’s commitment to the belief that free expression serves as a bulwark against tyranny was absolute.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in concurrence, “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all. The First Amendment does not entrust that power to the government’s benevolence.”
The decision in Matal v. Tam had sweeping implications, the most immediate of which was the federal government’s decision to abandon its campaign to compel the National Football League’s Washington Redskins to surrender their trademark and change their name. A fight that began in 1999, when a federal court found that a 1992 complaint against the team’s name had merit, ended in June 2017. “There’s the legal case, and then there’s the cause,” declared Jesse Witten, the attorney representing five Native Americans who brought the suit over the Redskins’ trademark. “It was a galvanizing force that caused people to pay attention to the cause.”3
Though the federal government is prohibited from imposing speech codes on private individuals or associations, those private individuals and associations are still perfectly free to police one another. And they do so liberally—at times, even recklessly.
Gender Roles
In August 2017, political media were shaken by the release of an internal memorandum disseminated among Google employees concerning a problem that preoccupies progressives: “gender inclusivity,” particularly in the sciences and technology.
The author of the memo observed that there are many more men than women at every level of the technology industry, an imbalance that, in Silicon Valley, is universally attributed to prejudice against women. The only remedy for that implicit discrimination against women, therefore, must be explicit discrimination against men. Such a policy, the memo argued, isn’t just immoral; it is conceptually flawed and doomed to fail.4
“Google has several biases, and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology,” the memo’s author, James Damore, wrote. Like the media and the social sciences, he contended, Google and its employees “lean left”—a conclusion that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, later reinforced when he testified before Congress that Silicon Valley is “an extremely left-leaning place.”5 “We should critically examine these prejudices,” Damore urged.
His memo outlined how Google might address the “gender gap” in ways that do not discriminate against qualified applicants—an effort, Damore contended, that could succeed only if Google acknowledged some inviolable truths. Among them is the fact that women and men are different. The sexes respond differently to social pressures and incentives, he noted. Though it is hardly a universal determinant, biology is an indication of how men and women navigate the world and how they make choices in their individual pursuits of happiness.
