Although race has become the defining cultural morality issue, it has simultaneously prompted a moral retreat within society.  This retreat has resulted in part from the increasing uncertainty surrounding racism.  During the civil rights era, racial discrimination was easy to spot.  It resided in laws that made it more difficult for minorities to vote and that sanctioned segregation in schools.  It could be seen in a university’s denial of admission to minority students.  But now we are said to be in a time of ‘subtle’ or ‘subconscious’ racism -- a racism of which the racist is unaware; a racism that has become so camouflaged it cannot be detected by the unassisted eye. 

Even as the anti-discrimination laws get stronger, even as the Race Studies departments in universities proliferate, even as corporate diversity training courses multiply, even as affirmative action programs become institutionalized, even as racism becomes the only real zero-tolerance social sin, racial discrimination is claimed to be as pervasive as ever.  There has evolved an almost unlimited list of different kinds of racism: subconscious racism, subtle racism, metaracism (racism generated by modern technology), process racism (referring to procedures that generate racially disparate outcomes), malignant racism and benign racism.  When merit systems fail to produce representational outcomes for minorities, institutional racism is alleged.

Because of all the doubt and anxiety surrounding racism, individuals do not know when or how they might be accused of racism.  Consequently, they refrain from voicing opinions not only on racial matters but on any other moral issue that might somehow have a racial dimension.  Afraid of doing anything that might be interpreted as racist, people are reluctant to set moral standards or make seemingly non-racial moral judgments, lest those judgments somehow acquire a racial edge.  There is a fear of condemning the violent and sexually explicit lyrics of rap music, since many rap artists are black.  There is a hesitancy to impose dress codes, lest those codes impact certain racial minorities.  There is a reluctance to vigorously denounce gang membership, lest it be revealed that minorities populate gangs.  There is even fear of criticizing illegal immigration, since most illegal immigrants are also members of a racial minority.  But that is just the beginning.  When racial minorities are relieved of moral duties, it is but a short step to the larger culture being relieved of those same duties.  In a society committed to equality, a two-tiered system of moral values cannot exist for long.

Charges of racism have become so widespread and pervasive, so automatically asserted, that they have done more than just correct instances of racist behavior -- they have led to a more profound condemnation of the entire culture.  When stories of past racial bigotry and segregation are continually recounted, as if such behavior still exists today, a moral downgrading of society occurs.  It is seen as pervasively racist, and hence incapable of acting with any moral purpose.  This in turn causes an erosion of trust and respect from all social institutions.

The real danger posed by the racial climate in America is not that the races will ultimately fail to live together in harmony; the real danger goes far beyond the matter of race relations -- it goes to the moral identity of society as a whole.  The danger is that the current climate of racial politics will contribute to a moral gutting of society, leaving it without the one trait necessary for the final and complete eradication of racism.  The danger is that America will go the direction of France and Germany, insofar as that those countries allowed the big injustices of their past to leave them morally paralyzed in the present.

Following World War II, Germany not only had to recover from the physical devastations of war, it had to deal with the moral guilt of Nazism.  France likewise had to live with the legacy of Vichy and its complicity with the Nazis.  These legacies robbed both countries of any real moral credibility during the post-war decades.  But the moral guilt also affected those countries internally.  Throughout the post-war period, both France and Germany moved sharply away from their traditional ties to moral authority.  Once very religious societies, France and Germany have become overwhelmingly secular.  In France, only one in twenty people attends a religious service on a weekly basis, and only ten percent believe religion to be “very important” in their lives.   In contrast, more than 60 percent of Americans claim that religion plays a “very important” role in their lives, and almost 90 percent profess a belief in God.  Public opinion experts note that moral relativism is “predominant in Europe.”  People in Europe are “embarrassed to talk about moral values,” says Tessa Keswick of the Center for Policy Studies in London.  Europeans have largely abandoned the fundamental values of the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition.

The ways in which France and Germany commemorate World War II is indicative of the moral guilt that plagues those countries.  (Indeed, France opposed its Nazi occupation with less vigor than it did the deposing of Saddam Hussein in 2003.)  Their war museums, for instance, preach condemningly about the follies of war, regardless of the cause of that conflict or the aims of the combatants; all violence is decried, as if the Allied forces were just as culpable as the Nazi war machine.  Only at the American and British cemeteries is a different vision of the war presented.  There, the story of a defeat of an evil tyrant is told.  Words like courage, sacrifice and duty are chiseled above the granite pavilions.  But those words are never used in Germany or France -- two countries who had to rely on outsiders to purge the Nazi virus from their borders; two countries that have lapsed into moral relativism because they have never found a way to resolve the moral guilt of their past.

France and Germany’s moral impotence can be seen in the way they refuse to take action in the face of modern crises, such as the genocide in Sudan and the nuclearization of Iran.  Their moral impotence has fostered a culture of “defeatism and appeasement.”  And this appeasement has shown itself in the almost unconditional support given to dictators like Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.

But there is a difference in the way that France and Germany handled their ‘big wrong’ and the way that America has dealt with its ‘big wrong’ -- the difference being that America addressed that wrong itself.  During a four year civil war, nearly three quarters of a million soldiers died in the struggle to end slavery -- and this does not count the wounded, the maimed, and the families who were left destitute because the war had taken their homes, their property, and their bread-winners.  A century later, America underwent a civil rights movement, which combated segregation and racial injustice.  Indeed, America has been struggling for a century and a half to rectify the wrong of slavery.

A necessary step in rectifying this wrong is to confront the social guilt over slavery.  Guilt can gag a society’s moral voice; and guilt regarding something as powerful as racism can impose a moral silencing on issues that stretch far beyond race.  The challenge, obviously, is to avoid becoming morally helpless because of unresolved guilt over the sins of the past.

The current state of confusion over racial matters is often attributed to the affirmative action mindset and the demise of the colorblind ideal.  In principle, a democratic society should turn a blind eye to the race, color, creed and gender of its citizens.  Rewards should be granted according to individual merit, not skin color.  This colorblind approach adopted by Dr. Martin Luther King provided a unifying energy to the civil rights movement.  It not only gave voice to racial minorities seeking social justice, it also inspired and enlisted the larger culture to mobilize against racism.  Because of its clarity and simplicity, the colorblind ideal served an important educational role: it revealed the inherent wrong of racism, while at the same time showing the path toward rehabilitation.

Currently, however, colorblindness is said to be just another aspect of racism.  It is said to be a tool with which whites can maintain a status quo where blacks are trapped in an unequal position.  It is said to be the rock behind which racists hide when opposing policies like affirmative action.  And yet, as the colorblind approach falls from favor, racial divisions in society appear to be deepening, with racial segregation intensifying and racial confusion spreading.  For instance, even though elite universities like Harvard are admitting more and more black students, African-American educators are still critical.  The reason is because the students are not the ‘right’ students.  Since the majority of black students at Harvard are West Indian and African immigrants, they are not the students for whom affirmative action admissions policies were ultimately intended -- the descendants of American slaves.

Having lost the moral clarity and simplicity of the colorblind ideal, racism in America has turned onto a one-way street.  When a white police officer kills a black youth, the officer is immediately vulnerable to charges of racism, but black policemen who kill white suspects are simply presumed to be doing their job.  When mobs of whites attack blacks, it is seen as further evidence of white bigotry; but when mobs of blacks attack whites, it is downplayed as a natural reaction to decades of white racist exploitation.  This double-standard approach to racism can be seen through a comparison of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.  During the late 1990s, Minneapolis had a black mayor and a white police chief, whereas St. Paul had a white mayor and a black police chief.  Whenever an issue of police brutality or police racism arose in St. Paul, the mayor became the object of criticism.  But when the same kind of issues arose in Minneapolis, the police chief bore the brunt of public outrage.

The underrepresentation of blacks in the fields of engineering and accounting is seen as evidence of racism, and yet the overrepresentation of blacks in the fields of sports and entertainment is given no racial significance.  In affirmative action cases involving universities, racial diversity is said to be vital to the educational process, and yet this argument is never made with respect to all-black colleges.  When the University of Georgia in March 2004 decided to consider race in its admissions process, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praised the decision as sound education policy.  “Diversity holds rewards for all students,” the editors wrote.  And yet, a mile away from the Journal-Constitution offices sit two virtually all-black colleges that reject such a view.

Crime and race is a subject inundated with confusion and contradiction.  The high incidence of black arrests and the high proportion of blacks in the nation’s prison population is often attributed to racism.  But this completely ignores the possibility that certain crimes may be committed more frequently by black perpetrators.  Professor Michael Tonry of the University of Minnesota Law School has found that the higher levels of arrests and incarceration of African-Americans is the result of higher levels of crime, not racial bias.  A research study commissioned by the New Jersey attorney general reported that on the New Jersey Turnpike blacks are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour, and yet are actually stopped less than their speeding behavior would predict.  Furthermore, law enforcement statistics compiled in New Jersey show that black state troopers stop the same proportion of black drives as do their white colleagues.

Contradictions also abound when dealing with the issue of racism on the part of minorities.  The racial atmosphere in the U.S. commonly reflects the assumption that whites have a special, inherent propensity toward racism -- a monopoly on racist behavior.  As Malcolm X once said, whites are incorrigibly racist, to the point of being satanic.  Harry Allen, an agent for the rap group Public Enemy, claims that “only white people can be racist.”  As Sister Souljah declares: “You can’t call me or any black person anywhere in the world a racist -- we don’t have the power to do to white people what white people have done to us; and even if we did, we don’t have that low-down dirty nature.”

Although having long decried racial stereotypes as reflective of racist attitudes, inner city blacks who chafe under the economic successes of Korean businesses attribute that success to the moral and ethical deficiencies of Koreans.  They succeed, the argument goes, because they are willing to adopt vicious and underhanded practices that are beneath African American ethical standards.  African Studies professor Anderson Thompson condemns “the miserable Asiatic...[who] like a parasite attacks the African consumer, boring from within.”  Similarly, rapper Ice Cube calls for violence against Korean merchants because they are “Oriental one-penny-counting motherf_____s.”

A survey conducted by the National Conference of Christians and Jews reports that many minority groups harbor much more hostile attitudes toward each other than do whites.  For example, 46 percent of Hispanics and 42 percent of blacks said that Asian Americans are “unscrupulous, crafty and devious in business,” whereas 53 percent of Asians and 51 percent of Hispanics affirmed that blacks “are more likely to commit crimes and violence.”  Surveys also show that African-Americans are more likely to hold anti-Semitic views than whites.  A survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League showed that 17 percent of whites and 37 percent of blacks espouse strong anti-Semitic beliefs.

As America becomes increasingly diverse and multicultural, racial tensions are occurring in a wider array of settings.  Racism is now being alleged even where whites are not involved.  In Plainfield, New Jersey, at least seventeen Hispanic men have been beaten to death by gangs of black men.  Even though black leaders in a city in which blacks form the majority say that racial hatred was not the cause of the deaths, substantial evidence exists indicating that the brutal beatings were in fact racially motivated.  Plainfield is a community in which African-Americans have complained that Hispanics are “taking over” and that Hispanics speak only Spanish and rarely hire blacks.  On their part, Hispanics claim that blacks are jealous of their economic success and are “out to get them,” and that the police are not doing enough to protect them from black violence.

When a white student at the University of Florida publicized the mission statement from an organization for which he claimed to have sought recognition from the Student Government Association, the student revealed after an outcry of racism that he had simply taken a publication from the Black Student Union and changed the word “black” to “white” each time it appeared.  When an unexpectedly large freshman class arrived at Wesleyan University and the administration tried to fill nine empty spaces at the Malcolm X student residential house with whites, the black residents objected to living with anyone of another race and the white students were forced to reside in the basement of the philosophy building.

Contrary to all the racism allegations, African-Americans have made significant progress.  While the median income of white households rose 19 percent between 1980 and 2000, that of black families rose 39 percent.  From 1970 to 2000, the most dramatic gains in life expectancy occurred in black men.  During the same time period, the percentage of blacks earning a high school diploma increased from 31 percent to 79 percent, and proportion of blacks with college degrees quadrupled.  From 1980 to 2000, the number of black households with incomes exceeding $75,000 increased more than two-and-a-half times.  And in just the ten year period from 1992 to 2002, the poverty rate for blacks fell almost a third.

The power of racism accusations to completely stifle or dismiss any other explanation is also illustrated in Michelle Malkin’s book In Defense of Internment.  As Malkin notes, the internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II has been cast as unquestionably an act of sheer racism. But Malkin presents an entirely different explanation.  She writes that President Roosevelt’s internment measures were based not on anti-Japanese racism but on a logical strategy of national defense, given the vulnerabilities of the U.S. to raids and attacks by small numbers of Japanese agents.  Malkin cites now-declassified information which shows that by mid-1941 the Japanese had set up an extensive espionage network along America’s West Coast, recruiting Japanese-Americans to conduct surveillance of military bases, shipyards, airfields and ports.  According to a secret U.S. government estimate, 3500 ethnic Japanese in America were active supporters of the Japanese war effort.

In America today, racism allegations can likewise shut down any further debate or inquiry.  It is almost taken for granted, for instance, that minorities are discriminated against in the employment hires of police departments.  But for every position in the New York Police Department for which promotion is discretionary, rather than determined by an objective merit test, blacks and Hispanics become detectives almost five years earlier than whites.  Moreover, whites wait twice as long to be appointed to high-ranking positions as deputy inspector or deputy chief than do blacks and Hispanics.

But beyond all the confusions and suffocations, the steady stream of racism charges is wearing down society’s confidence in its moral capacity.  When society is repeatedly accused of being inherently racist, and hence inherently immoral, people lose confidence in their individual and collective ability to do good.  This drives society into a moral emptiness.  It suspends moral judgment, making both society and the individual afraid to enforce moral standards.  No moral judgment can be made because of the fear of being tagged with discrimination.

Patrick Garry is a Professor of Law at the University of South Dakota Law School.

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