Civic Pieties: Tracing the Contemporary Views on Race

Social

Dimension

of

The question of race and public policy is an inquiry that of necessity must include contemporary perspectives, but it cannot cease there when it has succeeded in uncovering the almost kaleidoscopic pattern of attitudes and milieus that map the current scene. One feature of that scene that forcibly presents itself to our attention is the energetic involvement of powerful interests in shaping the public view of race and racial relations. In examining it, one can make out a group of related ideas that for convenience I will refer to as the authorized view. This view, very briefly, is simply the set of ideas that a great plurality of powerful figures in industry, government, education, and religion wish to promotewe presume for the common good, which might cynically be thought of as that mentality which promotes the interests, venal or otherwise, of such figures and those to whom they owe either patronage or deference. The authorized view does not proceed from a single vantage point, and within it there is contained surprising diversity for that which is intended to serve as a criterion of permissible expression and thought. However, this diversity does share certain presumptions and presuppositions that allow us to think of them as correlated, as acting independently or in concert to exclude and vilify rival perspectives.

The authorized view, in summary, is the institutionalization of a near triviality. While this view may admit of the reality of a social dimension of racial attitudes, and even a psychology of race, the narrative ends there amidst the plastic taxa of the zeitgeist. Certain traits predominate, however. Race is invariably classed among psycho-social chimera, and racial thinking as a form of neurosis. Some members of the conservative intelligentsia aver that society itself does not exist. Perhaps these would place race within the same category as society, that is, reifications. There is general acknowledgement among such people that race is a referent that points to no real (or at least important) attributes of the populations they are said to mark off. The biological facet of raceby an edict that is at once both social mandate and a candid confession that the industry of correctness has more than notional existenceis laughed to scorn in the salons of fashionable opinion. Still, is it merely a hollow farce on display? Perhaps we do not know precisely for whose benefit the comedy is staged, the sets painted, tickets bought and sold. It may be that for some of them the actors are also the audience. These last must be only a few. The opinion of the author is that no matter how well the principal has learnt his lines, he does not believe he is Don Quixote unless he is mad. It is a noble conceit of democracy that we may rely on the ideological ingenuousness of the political class.

Or is it we think that the builders of our public fountains do not themselves drink from them? In certain cases this is so. Nevertheless, the planners and managers of the civic mentality I am describing, as well as of the similarly enmassed and mechanistic political economy, and the probabilistic world in which they move, necessarily call for a more nuanced position than the gross ironies and mock hysteria of crude public discourse. The planning that is conducted daily by the technocratic bureaucracy must maintain a view that pays no obeisance to diktats that flow from those fountains of civic piety, save for the requisite merchandising of their social evolvement in the store windows of the media. This is merely a roundabout way of saying that the realities of certain kinds of work in the world that is done nowadays in managing the masses calls for certain polite insincerities on subjects of great public delicacy. These are awful enough to contemplate, without there existing, besides, a class of men who are True Believers, the ideological John Browns of the undeclared warwar, that is, for the Abolition of unauthorized thought. Unbeknownst to many of European descent, we live now in an antebellum period during which the inculcation of psychological terror (of being caught out in impermissible thought) is portrayed as psychotherapy. Psychomachia is the newest frontier of the forever war of puritan Abolition. --End of this section

Corresponding to the range of impermissible thought which is subject of the racial psychomachia is also a range of impermissible speech and discussion. Indeed these are the cardinal sins, where thought may be understood to be causative, but also venial, if appropriate atonement is made. Prominent among these taboos is the proscription against discussion of causes of social inequality that lie outside of authorized explanatory rubrics. Sociobiology is the Copernican Theory of modern sociology. It is the thought that cannot be thought, the notion that cannot be confessed. [] What cannot be discussed is the sheer magnitude of public resources that have been poured into the public redress of inequality. Sanguine futurism of both capitalistic and socialistic utopians aside, we live in a world of scarcity where infinite meliorationperhaps well suited to the infinitely recurring pangs of the European conscienceis scarcely feasible. Is it reasonable to think that were inequality of a social origin it ought to have a social solution that might be addressed by finite policy with finite resources? Or is the excision of the verboten view of race another of the interminable wars against a spectral enemy which have become so common of late? Public attitudes are intractable, but they are not invulnerable to change. We have seen them change in our own lifetime, and we do not require the assent of experts

to validate this observation. What remains for us to determine is whether these attitudes that suddenly changed, did so without concerted impetus originating in the defining institutions of society, operating not as representative, but as determinative organizations. I have written defining, but clarification is here needed. What I mean is the institutions that determine the kind of society we will have.