September 15, 2005
Race, an American Obsession Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:35 PM EST In the March issue of our print magazine, David Brion Davis wrote that slavery (along with its aftereffects, to which we now assign the shorthand title “race”) was “the central fact of American history.” That’s true, of course, and the same could be said of many other things. One can complete the academic triumvirate by substituting class (as the Marxists would have it) or gender (as the feminists would) for race, and a recent book by Harold Evans portrayed technology as the driving force in American history. Then there’s migration, immigration, education, homophobia, baseball… As an analytical exercise or an aid to comprehension, saying that all of American history revolves around a single thing does have some value, though all too often it is reminiscent of the old joke about the book on elephants. (Okay, briefly: A group of Europeans of different nationalities are asked to write a book on elephants. The German compiles a 20-volume treatise on the philosophy of elephants; the Italian writes an elephant cookbook; the Frenchman writes on the love life of elephants; [insert as many more examples here as you wish]; and (here comes the punch line) the Pole writes about “Elephants and the Polish Question.”) Yet it can be all too easy to concentrate on a single aspect of a complicated situation and portray it as the key to everything. Over the last two weeks we’ve all read the summaries of previous floods, fires, earthquakes, heat waves, etc., which killed and displaced people of all races indiscriminately, yet it has become an instant clichi that the people affected by Katrina would not have suffered as badly if they had been white. Like all arguments of the “if your grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle” type, this one is circular and unproveable (which is not the same as being false). To people accustomed to seeing everything in racial terms, however, it seems obvious. Similarly, AmericanHeritage.com a few days ago featured an article by our extremely able contributor Elizabeth Hoover, a fondly remembered former co-worker of mine, about the Attica riot (pardon, I mean uprising). She writes: “At the core of the situation was race.” That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to say that the inmates were a group of vicious criminals who had severely beaten a number of guards, killing one of them, and when the corrections commissioner demanded that they release their hostages, the prisoners displayed several of them with knives held to their throats. To me, that’s the core of the situation. There’s no question that, as Elizabeth says, both sides displayed “incompetence and miscalculation,” and that the intended rescue was horrifically bungled. But it’s hard to make a charge of racism stick when so many whites were killed (and when, as the inmate quoted by Elizabeth points out, “they” were killing white college students as well). To me, the biggest lesson from Attica is that if you’re in a negotiation and trying to convince the other side of your good faith, it’s not a good idea to beat and kill your hostages, or to threaten them with knives.
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