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Civil Rights & Wrongs
It is now official. Ring the bells and sound the huzzahs. As
America turns the
corner on the new century, it has become devastatingly clear that
"Civil Rights"
is no longer a social issue requiring remediation.
This past few weeks have provided several splendid examples of
why this is so.
On one side we were greeted by the sight of Jesse Jackson making
a complete fool
of himself by trying to undo the expulsion of a bunch of thugs
who got into a
brawl at a football game. It is apparently okay for black
youths to beat the
hell out of each other at a school function, but not okay for
white school board
members to punish them for it. On the other side we see
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,
desperate for black votes, mount a sting operation to test the
political
correctness of New York's cabbies. It seems that these
cabbies may be reluctant
to pick up certains hues of customer (or, more accurately,
certain customers
they assume to be going to dangerous neighborhoods), and hizzoner
is not going
to stand for it. In the middle, the NAACP denounces the use
of test scores as a
means of determining college admissions, apparently because they
believe such
tests discriminate against Americans of African origin.
There is an entire industry dedicated to uncovering Civil Rights
abuses and
trying to do something about it. The picayune issues listed
above appear to be
just about the best the grievance crowd can dig up as 1999 comes
to a close.
Let us repeat this, as it is not a trivial matter. It
seems that the most
serious Civil Rights violations occurring in contemporary America
revolve around
whether or not young black Americans are being treated nicely by
schools boards
and cabbies, or are doing well on college entrance exams.
If there were even a
hint of real, serious Civil Rights issues like those of the '50s
and '60s, Jesse
and Al and Kweme would be all over them. But they're not.
Because the problems
are not there.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded only
because it
addressed palpable denials of basic civil rights to a portion of
the citizenry
based solely on the color of their skin. This was so clearly
incompatible with
the core ideals of a democracy, and with the moral/social
attitudes of post-WWII
America, that once King and Co. displayed the moral fortitude to
forthrightly
oppose it, state sanctioned segregation crumbled.
One of my favorite historical themes is that great men do not
create change, but
rather take advantage of "change in progress". Men
of MLK's talent and skill
existed for the hundred years prior to his influence, but they
did not transform
social attitudes regarding race for the simple reason that
society at large did
not care to make those changes. The primary impact of great men
and great
movements is not to change basic societal attitudes, but to drag
an
unenlightened minority into compliance at the point that the
larger society has
demonstrated willingness to change. Many on the left do not
understand this,
preferring to believe that the activism of civil rights leaders
caused the
changes of the '50s and '60s. This is analagous to a rooster
believing that his
crow causes the sun to rise.
Thus Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and a host of other self-anointed
"civil rights
leaders" search endlessly for new causes to champion, new
changes to make, new
power to leverage. But starting in the late '60s, the
causes they found were no
longer matters of segregation and denial of basic civil rights (properly
understood). They began to reach farther afield, attempting
to change not
racist law, not attitudes towards race and ethnicity, but social
outcomes.
Bussing and affirmative action were the first steps down a
slippery slope away
from the moral principles of the civil rights struggle and
towards mundane
corruption and politcally correct irrelevancy.
Massive white guilt (not entirely unjustified) made many loathe
to criticicize
anything with the term "civil rights" attached to it.
So Jackson, and Sharpton,
and lefties of every stripe and color ran amok through the
republic protected by
self-aggrandizing claims that they were promoting "civil
rights". It appears,
and I fervently hope the appearance is true, that they may have
run out their
string. Courageous black Americans like Thomas Sowell,
Walter Williams, Ward
Connerly, J.C. Watts and others have risked abusive calumny to
tell the truth
about "race hustlers" and "poverty pimps".
David Horowitz has made a full
frontal assault on the pretensions of "civil rights"
with his recent book
"Hating Whitey, and Other Progressive Causes". And
now the self-declared
leaders of what passes for a "civil rights movement"
advertise loudly and for
all to see that they are bereft of meaningful issues.
Maybe we have reason to hope as we enter the next century that
these bozos will
get out of the way and let Martin King's dream shine through.
