Myth of the racist cabbie - rational discrimination versus racism

National Review, Oct 9, 1995 by Dinesh D'Souza

Jesse Jackson acknowledged the cultural pathology of violence among inner-city blacks when he said, "There is nothing more painful for me than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery, and then see it's somebody white and feel relieved." Faced with immediate criticism from other black activists, Jackson hurried to "clarify" his views and deny that he meant what he said. But several African-American scholars have made the same point. Johnnetta Cole writes that among black women "one of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people." Given black crime rates, Howard University education professor Kenneth Tollett says, "The statements we have called stereotypes in the past have become true."

Personally I would be angry and upset if, as a law-abiding person, I were routinely treated as a criminal by taxidrivers, storekeepers, or pedestrians. Yet, equally predictably, taxidrivers, storekeepers, and women who clutch their purses or cross the street will attach little significance to such personal and historical sensitivities. Such people are unlikely to be intimidated by accusations of prejudice. For them, the charges are meaningless, because the prejudice is warranted. In this context, a bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials.

IT IS now time to examine with fresh eyes the meaning of familiar terms such as prejudice and stereotype, which underlie the conventional liberal understanding of racism. African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates writes: "Racism exists when one generalizes about attributes of an individual, and treats him or her accordingly." Gates offers some specific examples: "You people sure can dance," and "Black people play basketball so remarkably well." He concludes, "These are racist statements." But are they?

In his classic work, The Nature of Prejudice, published in 1954, Gordon Allport drew on modern social-science theories to explicate the paradigm of liberal anti-racism. Allport argued that prejudices and stereotypes reveal less about their objects than their subjects. Applying such concepts as displacement and frustration-aggression theory, Allport maintained that when people feel hostility and anger which they have difficulty coping with, they project it onto others, who thus become sacrificial victims or "scapegoats." Allport helped to establish a premise that many social scientists continue to hold today: prejudices and stereotypes endure because of the principle of self-selection. From the distorted perspective of the racist, blacks who do not conform to preconceived notions simply do not exist; they are, in Ralph Ellison's term, invisible men.

For the better part of a generation, this liberal understanding of racism worked fairly well. The reason was that both whites and blacks had indeed developed many erroneous views about each other as a consequence of the social isolation produced by Southern segregation. During slavery the races stayed in regular, even intimate, contact, but after emancipation the forced separation of the races created a divided society in which dubious and even absurd generalizations could endure, unchecked by contrary experience. The civil-rights movement's assault on prejudices and stereotypes, as well as the experience of desegregation, helped to topple many such group generalizations that could not withstand empirical examination.