Stress on Morality Avoids the Real Issues
Lee Sustar
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • Winter 1993-1994 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 2 (pp. 38) | ||
| • September 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Around the Fourth of July, Cornel West’s Race Matters pulled ahead of Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be on the bestseller list of the New York Times.
The fact that a book of essays by a Black socialist could outpace the reactionary ravings of a talk show host shows how much things have changed since the Reagan-Bush era.
Unfortunately, West’s attacks on the system are far outnumbered by rather empty, moralistic exhortations for Blacks and whites of all social classes to somehow come together in social harmony.
Far from a cohesive polemic on racism in the U.S., Race Matters is a collection of unrelated essays that ultimately fail to analyze the persistence of Black oppression.
And although West, 39, is a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, he does not argue for a socialist United States.
Instead, West—a Princeton University professor of religion and author of several books on philosophy—makes only a vague call for a return to liberal policies.
The book begins promisingly, with social criticism of a sort nearly absent in the go-go boom of the 1980s:
“American politics has been rocked by an unleashing of greed among opportunistic public officials—who have followed the lead of their counterparts in the private sphere, where, as of 1989, 1 percent of the population owned 37 percent of the wealth—leading to a profound cynicism and pessimism.”
West points out that real wages of all workers have declined 20 percent since 1973, while wealth has been redistributed upwards.
Discussion of Racism
But having clearly [demarcated] this class line, West sets about erasing it from his discussion of racism.
He insists that the Los Angeles rebellion “was neither a race riot nor a class rebellion. Rather, this monumental upheaval was of a multiracial, trans-class, and largely male display of justified social rage.”
For West, L.A. was not a result of class polarization, but a moral breakdown that transcends class.
“The Los Angeles upheaval was an expression of utter fragmentation by a powerless citizenry that includes not just the poor but all of us.”
Yet “all of us” did not have to use a riot to obtain diapers and food, as many did in South-Central L.A.
The rich in Beverly Hills are not the “powerless citizenry.”
They did not have to live in fear of troops occupying their streets or the midnight roundup by the LAPD.
Because West lacks a consistent class analysis of racism, he sometimes ends up blaming the victims of the system.
His essay, “Nihilism in Black America” echoes the arguments of those who push the racist theory that a “culture of poverty” is to blame for Black oppression.
West claims to reject those thinkers because he links “a sense of worthlessness and hopelessness in Black America” to “the structural dynamics of corporate market institutions.”
But rather than call for a struggle against those institutions, he calls for a “love ethic” that “confronts the self-destruction and inhumane actions of Black people.”
This is nothing but a philosophical version of the call for Black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
West’s chapters on Black leadership do not come to grips with the growing class divide in Black America.
“Moral Reasoning”
He concludes that the Black political establishment tended to back Black conservative Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court because they lacked “a prophetic framework of moral reasoning.”
West does not consider the possibility that much of the liberal Black establishment backed the conservative Thomas because they shared his pro-capitalist world view.
The author does target the “decadence” of the Black middle class and dismisses most Black elected officials as ineffectual administrators of a crisis-ridden system.
Again, West sees this as a moral failure rather than evidence that the growing Black middle class has interests different from, and increasingly opposed to, those of Black workers.
Class is also missing from West’s essay on Black-Jewish relations.
By emphasizing Black anti-Semitism, West neglects the ways in which Jewish upward mobility and assimilation in the last 50 years undermined the old working-class basis for Black-Jewish solidarity in the struggle for social justice.
Rather than gaining insights into how Black-Jewish relationships are shaped by dynamics of race and class, we get yet another lecture about the moral content of the Black movement.
The same is true of West’s treatment of homophobia and sexism among Black Americans.
Because he tends to divorce individual morality from collective struggle, West cannot see how such backward ideas can be broken down in movements for social change.
Unfortunately, Race Matters never comes close to even raising the question, let alone answering it.
Many anti-racists will want to read Race Matters to keep up with current debates on race and class in the U.S.
But the book cannot be recommended as a useful tool in the anti-racist struggle.
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