When former Representative Mel Reynolds of Illinois was hauled off to the pokey last month for engaging in sexual relations with an underage girl, he nevertheless managed to strike a heroic pose. "When they shackle me," he said, "like they shackled my slave ancestors, and take me off to jail, nobody in this room will see me crawl." It was race hypocrisy on a scale almost to match that of Johnnie Cochran, who was widely supposed to have got O. J. Simpson acquitted of murder by comparing Detective Mark Fuhrman of the Los Angeles Police Department to the late dictator and mass-murderer Adolf Hitler.

Why did the respective courtrooms not burst into laughter at such extravagant comparisons?

Why did the respective courtrooms not burst into laughter at such extravagant comparisons? Our racial problem is not a lack of toleration but an excess of it—toleration, that is, of stupidity and mendacity and the most outrageous and self-serving nonsense when they come clothed in the garments of racial self-righteousness. And, of course, such toleration breeds still more outrageous and self-serving nonsense. It begins to look as if it is simply impossible to be honest about race in America. The controversy last year over The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, made this pretty clear, but the events of the past month have confirmed it.

What National Review said about the American justice system in the wake of the Simpson trial—that "trials have become brownie-point contests between rival gangs of lawyers, conducted according to hermetic standards of judgment, and in a vacuum-tube of epistemological nihilism"—is also true of race relations. There is increasingly no common devotion to truth or objectivity to restrain the racial advocates of either side. Argument is a mere function of political strength. Which is why, later in the month, nearly haft a million black men, most of them presumably in full possession of their faculties, were willing to be led to Washington by a certifiable lunatic—and why they insisted that they were really a million and a half.

It doesn't matter that Louis Farrakhan believes that he was taken up into a spaceship by aliens and told the secrets of the worldwide white conspiracy (I have heard him say this, though it is not the part of his message that gets on the evening news). Perhaps he doesn't really believe this but only says it to play on the credulity of those who also believe what they read in the supermarket tabloids. Or perhaps there is a kind of tacit agreement between them that he will pretend to believe it and they will pretend to believe him because they share in his purpose. For the purpose is simply that Farrakhan should be a big man, a man who can stand up to whitey on behalf of his fellow blacks.

So is O. J., for that matter. That jury instinctively knew what the rest of us have only learned subsequently: that the trial was not about O. J.'s guilt or innocence. It was about whether the law-enforcement establishment, seen as white, had enough strength to put away a black man in a black neighborhood. No way! It was like Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling to the black fight-fans: the only thing that mattered was that their champion was one of them. And why should we expect it to be otherwise? Often enough in the past a black man's skin color has got him convicted; now are blacks going graciously to decline the tacit invitation of the lately liberalized white establishment to make his skin color a reason to acquit him? I don't think so.

What must have been to blacks the most amusing thing about the Simpson affair was the spectacle of the white liberal media at first registering the horror of whites at Simpson's acquittal and at black celebrations of it and then desperately trying to find reasons for understanding what it imagined was the black point of view. Excuse me, they seemed to say, for not yet thinking up enough good reasons why O. J. didn't cut off his wife's and Mr. Goldman's heads, or why, if he did, he had a perfect right to cut them off. Jacob Weisberg, in New York, was one of the few who had the guts to pour the scorn on this attitude that it deserves. But even he seemed to me to miss the point slightly in calling the black attitude "the latest manifestation of Afrocentrism" and the new separatist impulse among blacks.

For what was at work in the reaction both to the Simpson verdict and to the Million Man March was not the search for what Weisberg calls "a viable program for change" but a chance to express feelings publicly, to strike an attitude, and to horrify and outrage those white liberals whose sense of racial guilt so predictably leads them to being horrified and outraged. As Nathan McCall said in The Washington Post: "In a very real way, the Million Man March represents a kind of therapy for black men." It is the therapy of standing up together and feeling strong, no doubt, but it is also the therapy of making the good liberals of The Washington Post and the rest of the media which came in for such a pasting wring their hands and agonize over how they have failed.

The Post in particular was predisposed to do just that thanks to Miss Ruth Shalit of The New Republic, who published in mid-September a 13,000-word piece called "Race in the Newsroom" documenting the state of race relations there. On Miss Shalit's showing, they are not good. And one is inclined to take her word for it if only because of the squeals of outrage emanating from the management of the Post. The other side of this outrage is what Miss Shalit calls the "penitential eagerness" with which Leonard Downie, Jr., the papers executive editor, Robert Kaiser, the managing editor, and Michael Getler, the deputy managing editor for diversity [sic], tried to convince her that the Post as described in recent critical books by the black writers Jill Nelson and Nathan McCall is no more.

At the same time she reveals a nice understanding of the real nature of the problem without ever stating it. This is that for blacks at the Post and other such liberal institutions it is both pleasurable and profitable to attack the bosses who are so often pathetically eager to recruit them and keep them happy. ("Neither McCall nor Nelson would talk to me for this story," Miss Shalit writes by the way. "Nelson was summering on the Vineyard; McCall, who has a movie deal in the works, was, according to his agent, 'all media-ed out." ") The editors' response is invariably a mixture of febrile defensiveness and cringing apology. Please give us another chance! We'll do better next time. Just, in fact, as they did the last time. That was in 1993 when Getler was appointed as head of an internal task force to investigate the subject of race in the newsroom. Not surprisingly, the task force found that "racial and ethnic minority staffers say the Post is not doing what it can, and should, by them" and recommended that a deputy managing editor for diversity should be appointed.

Getler himself got the job, which involves "blasting stereotypes and preaching infusion" and telling white staff members that "you can have [racist] attitudes that you're not even aware of." What he seems not to be aware of is how people are likely to react to the news that some bureaucratic hunter of unapproved thoughts and "attitudes" is poking about in their unconscious minds, looking for reasons to send them for re-education. Under the circumstances, it is the height of hypocrisy, as well of rhetorical confusion, to say as Getler does that "the Post is a very candid place. It's not defensive about itself. It's a place where you can say anything you want . . . It's a place that lays open its warts. in order to fix them."

It doesn't take a medical degree to know that anyone who "lays open" warts is not going to "fix'" them. But that's the Post/s story and it's sticking to it. Likewise, the paper stoutly maintains that, in the words of the Getler report, "diversity does not mean excluding white men or threatening their jobs. It does not mean . . . hiring unqualified or less qualified people: Likewise, it insists that its "diversity campaign has more to do with improving coverage than redressing past grievances?' Any fool can see that these are blatant lies. Maybe diversity hiring is right and maybe it is wrong, but it is silly and typical of liberal hypocrisy to pretend that it is only the unsophisticated or the uneducated, those who have not the advantage of "diversity training," who believe that it is what it so patently and undeniably is.

Miss Shalit sardonically remarks: "But diversity training may not be sufficient to stem the current white backlash against affirmative action, which sometimes bubbles over into pure racial animosity." But sometimes it is hard to tell if her bubbling back-lashes are ironic or if she really thinks that efforts toward "diversity training" ought to be redoubled. When she reports that some whites at the Post have been heard to say about some blacks: "She can't write a lick" or "He's dumb as a post," she goes on to refer to "the ugliness of these sentiments." Does she mean that it is ugly to say such things at all (is it impossible that Mack people might not be able to write or might actually be very stupid?) or only that ugliness is ugly? Perhaps there is a kind of hypocrisy which is necessary even to the reporting of hypocrisy when it comes to racial matters.

But the hysterical replies of Leonard Downie, Jr., and Donald Graham, who wrote lengthy letters to the editor of The New Republic, are the best indications that she has got it right. Downie accuses her of using "the maddening technique of big-lie propaganda" and of"racial McCarthyism"—charges so outrageous, I guess, because they are meant to cover the obvious "big lie," which he continues to defend, that "we have not adjusted standards in any way in our hiring of dozens of talented journalists of color who do distinguished work?' He accuses The New Republic itself of being "nearly all-white" (the blacker-than-thou defense), and then, in his next paragraph, insists that she is quite wrong to suggest that "our hiring is being dictated by the numbers, forcing a compromising of standards."

The rest of his letter is a mixture of corrections of (mostly trivial) mistakes of fact and lawyerly evasions which affect not one whir the substance of her argument, together with a personal attack on her which does not scruple to mention her two apologies for plagiarism. Then Graham takes his turn with a similarly intemperate attack which concentrates on characterizing The New Republic as "the last practitioner of de facto segregation since Mississippi changed." His defense of everything the Post has ever done with regard to race was backed up by a number of the Post's reporters, editors, and commentators in the pages of the Post over a period of several weeks, all of them apparently unaware that the more they deny it the more guilty they look.

But the absolute worst of the Post's special pleading came from the last person who should have done it, the Ombudsman, Geneva Overholser. A few days before she wrote, it was revealed in The Wall Street Journal that Ms. Overholser, who is the former editor of The Des Moines Register, had just bought a house in Washington with David Westphal, her former deputy in Des Moines, who had left, seemingly by coincidence, at the same time—a time when they were both married to someone rise. As she left the Register with strong words of criticism for its owners' failure of commitment to the noblest ends of the journalistic art, the news left something of a bad taste in the mouths of the many who had congratulated her for her courageous stand at the time.

“More than a few people here have felt stung by factual errors and what they feel are misrepresentations of their views."

Her response to this story and to Miss Shalit's attack on the Post was to fold them into one column headed: "When the Tables Are Turned: It is a model of mendacity and self-righteousness, which are unfortunately not entirely untypical of the Post or of other bastions of high-minded journalism. "It's a flawed piece; writes Ms. Overholser of "Race in the Newsroom," "but one that takes on that most powerful and delicate issue, race relations. More than a few people here have felt stung by factual errors and what they feel are misrepresentations of their views."

Oh dear! Poor people. I should have thought that they would be more stung by truth than by error, but the weaselly "what they feel" is meant to leave the question of Miss Shalit's "misrepresentations" open while at the same time suggesting that she could document them if she chose. But this kind of mealy-mouthed evasion is as nothing compared to her comments on her own personal life. She reiterates her insistence on the fact that her leaving the Register was for professional reasons and then writes: "At the time, my personal life was unsettled and unclear." This is not the same thing as saying the break-up of her marriage was entirely coincidental, now is it? "I wouldn't know for more than two months that my husband and I would be divorcing"—no, but you might have had a pretty good idea—"and I wouldn't know for longer than that how this next part of my life would take shape."

What does that mean? That she didn't know what block the house was on that she and Mr. Westphal (whose name she doesn't mention when she demurely admits that "now we are together in Washington") were going to buy? This is a positively Nixonian denial, and thus doubly rich coming from the Ombudsman of The Washington Post. It is so transparent it is laughable. But the best is yet to come:

The main lesson for me is that such subtleties don't do well in the news process. I can repeat and repeat that I genuinely left the job for professional reasons. I can say that I couldn't have added then the truth about the course my personal life would take, because I didn't know. None of that holds the kind of power for people that this one fact holds: Eight months later, the two of us are together here in Washington.

Which is another way of saying that "actions speak louder than words" and isn't this a crying shame for a wordsmith like her? Why don't people just listen to her denials instead of putting two and two together as the base vulgar do? But she is suffering through it. Oh yes! She has become a better, a purer person on account of the unfair treatment she has received from her fellow scribes: "Another lesson of course is the empathy that this makes me feel for other people in the news. I'm feeling misrepresented and a little buffeted-familiar sentiments among news subjects." Nor is this the end of her self-improvement in adversity: "One thing I learned as this has progressed is that lots of journalists don't have much respect for themselves or for the trade. More than one has said to me, 'Rule number one is, don't talk to reporters.'"

What a laugh! I wonder if anyone added: Don't talk to reporters if you're guilty? But dear Ms. Overholser, in spite of all that the beasts have done to her, still believes that they have too mean an opinion of themselves—which is probably why they have been mean to her. Never mind, it all evens out:

The main thing for me is that this reconfirms something I've always felt. That is, accuracy in news is a cumulative thing. Over the course of my career, I've been uncomfortable with how glowingly some stories have portrayed me. Just as I'm uncomfortable now with how critically these do. But however faulty the specific pieces, I think news coverage about me over the years pretty much adds up to a comprehensive truth. And I think that's true of news coverage generally.

What chutzpah! The fact that she has been ludicrously overpraised in the past by journalists who, like her, are self-regarding and self-righteous about their higher calling is now supposed to make up for the fact that she has been caught in some pretty sleazy behavior. You couldn't find a better example of what's wrong with journalism—and, indeed, public life—in America today.

Recent events have shown anew that the Post staff also is filled with all those emotions.

For we see something similar in her column on the Million Man March a few weeks later. "For a long time," she writes, "U.S. newspapers have contributed to the division among races by falling short of telling the story of all Americans." For example? "The wonderfully affirming stories of men and women celebrating their love through marriage were for years told in one skin tone only." Geneva understandably has affirming stories of celebrating love through marriage much on her mind lately. But now both she and the Post have plenty of reason to feel good about themselves: "This newsroom today is filled with men and women, young and old, of every color, looking like the world they cover. The results are uneven, but rich with promise." Of course there are problems. "Hurt and anger, ignorance and fear are everywhere. Recent events have shown anew that the Post staff also is filled with all those emotions. But it is filled too with a commonality of purpose that is hopeful as can be."

And so on and on like Little Merry Sunshine. Damn your emotions, Madam! Are you getting facts straight or aren't you? And of course they are not. Such fuzzy, feel-good stuff pretty much sets the tone for the Post's stupefyingly lengthy, boring, and euphemistic coverage of the march itself, which included "Style" section pieces on how "Behind the Scenes, the Women Count" in organizing the march, or, referring to Farrakhan's career before he became a prophet, "Louis Farrakhan, Calypso Charmer": (" 'Oh, honey, he was gorgeous; remembers Daisy Voigt, who in those days wrote a teen column under the name Dizzy Dame Daisy.")

The news pages were, of course, more solemn:

It was an overpoweringly positive event, one captured by an Arabic phrase that became the day's mantra, shouted from the podium and called in response by the crowd: "As-salaam alaikum."

Peace be with you.

Sun glinted off the Capitol dome, rising in the background like a promise. Tears welled in the eyes of Samuel Herbert, a cancer research technician from Buffalo. Around him was a sea of black men and black culture free of the myths so prevalent in American society.

No guns, No drugs. Only dignity and hope . . .

No one would know from reading The Washington Post what five minutes of watching the march on television would have revealed: that speaker after speaker said hate-filled things about the "rich white men in power" who were repeatedly blamed for black people's problems. So far from being "A Day of Atonement" it was primarily a day of accusations. Former representative Gus Savage, who in 1992 had the unique distinction of having made Mel Reynolds look good, prefaced an attack on the Jews, South Koreans, and Vietnamese by saying that "Blacks should atone not for our anger but for not being angry enough." And where, as in Louis Farrakhan's speech, the anger was briefly turned on "drive-by shootings" and "car-jackings" that were destroying the black community, the withers of those present were unwrung. Like the cancer research technician, Samuel Herbert, they were largely professional or technical workers whose acquaintance with car-jacking was strictly limited. Only the injunction against filthy language may have struck home.

About Farrakhan's two-hour speech, which included fascinating discourses on numerology and other arcane subjects, the Post wrote only that "he lectured black men to atone for their shortcomings and dedicate themselves to a better future; denounced the country's founding fathers and the leaders of the modern Republican and Democratic parties; alternately argued with and reached out to critics; and spoke mystically of words, numbers and symbols that he said helped demonstrate that he had spoken for God in calling yesterday's march." It is true that, in the "Style" section, Ken Ringle was permitted a brief, light-hearted piece which poked gentle fun at Farrakhan's obviously paranoid numerological speculations as if this were some amusing quirk, a personal idiosyncrasy, which had inexplicably caused him to miss his chance to inspire the crowd with rhetoric the equal of Martin Luther King's. And Ringle had to qualify his criticisms by noting that "even his severest critics have to credit him for making the Million Man March happen," and that "he seemed to be reaching out in new directions, past the bitterness in his past speeches." What a pity then that he failed to take his audience "to rhetorical heights" and that the speech was "considerably less than one expected from the most electric public speaker in black America today." Pity, too, that he is a lunatic, I guess, but that we have to deduce for ourselves.

A few days before there had been a brief mention of Farrakhan's mental health in one of the huge numbers of pre-march articles, almost: all of them up-beat or determinedly even-handed ("March's Directions," read the front-page headline that day: "Unifying or Divisive?"). Terry M. Neal in a profile of Farrakhan wrote:

Some critics see him as a man with a penchant for paranoia, noting his frequent assertions that AIDS and drugs were purposely introduced into black communities by whites. His call for the march, he has said, was prompted by a vision that he had of being carried away to a spaceship where he met with Elijah Muhammad. Mindful that some have quietly snickered at the story, Farrakhan told a Washington audience recently, "I really don't care if you think I'm a nut."

Well, that's treating the story with kid gloves! What on earth is "a penchant for paranoia"? And "some critics see"? As if such an outrageous accusation as that whites were trying to kill blacks with AIDS and drugs were something—like, say, the O. J. verdict—that reasonable people could differ about. And does he say that it was "a vision" of a spaceship or does he say it was a spaceship? It was the latter when I heard him say it.

In an example of that healthy give-and-take on race at the Post refered to be Michael Getler, the next day's editorial page alluded to Neal's piece. Without mentioning it by name, the editorial writer criticized "the distancing language that has appeared in newspapers (including this one) in recent days and also in much of the reporting and commentary elsewhere." The prime example of this "distancing language" is the word "critics" ("or; the editorial adds parenthetically, "even more marginally 'some critics'")—as if one were to say that "critics" objected to the racism of Mark Fuhrman instead of the simple fact that Mark Fuhrman was a racist.

The paper's editorials of the time hadn't approved of that kind of casuistry, either.

The writer goes on to compare those who try to take the good out of Farrakhan to those who approved of the better purposes of Joseph McCarthy or George Wallace. The paper's editorials of the time hadn't approved of that kind of casuistry, either.

Such hair-splitting arguments are usually addressed to white liberals, who still imagine that their approval is important to blacks. On the contrary. The positive aspects of Farrakhan's message have been delivered by others for years without much impact. What makes 400,000 blacks come to Washington for Farrakhan is more likely to be smug editorials in The Washington Post attacking him:

Repeatedly, Minister Farrakhan exulted that he was the leader of the gathered assemblage, that he had been validated personally by the event, that you could not realize the legitimate goals that were set forth throughout the day and at the same time not accept his leadership. We don't think so.

Don't you indeed! It is typical of the patronizing Post to presume to tell the black multitudes on the mall that their coming had not been, as so many of them fondly imagined, a validation of Farrakhan's leadership. Oh no! The owners and editors of the Post knew better. They knew what had really been the intention of those who heeded the call of Farrakhan. Somehow I think that if I were black and read that editorial, it would have been enough to make me march. It would be precisely the fact that the Post and others in the white liberal establishment don't like him which would draw me to him. Their opposition means that he is scary and dangerous to them, that he is bad—and that's good!

It all reminds me of the serial-killer trading cards which, on the same day as the march, a federal judge said that Nassau County Long Island had no authority to ban. Maybe it didn't, but it was the attempt to ban them which put the seal on the cards' attractiveness for teenagers eager to strike an attitude. Minister Farrakhan is "bad" in the same way that gangsta rap is "bad"—and the relatively prosperous and gentle folk who turned out for the march love him for the same reason that middle-class white kids love the rappers: it is a pose which annoys people they like to annoy. The rappers annoy parents and teachers the same way that Farrakhan annoys the white establishment.

Now just as most of the kids who listen to rap would never dream of actually shooting cops or abusing women as "ho's" and "bitches" but like to be thought of, like Michael Jackson in military regalia, as "dangerous,"' so the mostly respectable, mostly employed, nearly entirely non-criminal crowds that turned out for the march don't hate Jews or white people or believe in the fantastical conspiracies of Farrakhan or the ludicrous rhetoric of many of his fellow speakers at the rally. But they know—and, more importantly, Farrakhan knows—that so long as the "rich white men in power" hate Farrakhan, he can't be all bad.

He is the symbol of an attitude whose importance is determined by the demands of the media theater which has so largely replaced more civilized forms of public discourse. Like Ice-T or Tupac Shakur, Farrakhan is a symbol of power to the powerless, the lower-middle classes who want to do better and fear doing worse who make up all fascist movements. Military regalia, whether of the jackboots and jodphurs variety or of the street-gang variety, is big. Those men on the mall knew that they were most of them better off than their fathers were and that their children were likely to be better off than they were. They were not the people involved in drive-by shootings and car-jackings; they were on the inside track compared with the ghetto kids of Anacostia just a couple of miles away. But it flattered them to think that they were being associated with the gun-toting kids in the street. Violence is romantic, and never more romantic than when the more or less alien power structure is afraid of it.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 14 Number 3, on page 57
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