Today, of course, it is customary to collapse, if not overwrite, our individual characteristics into new, but now acceptable, stereotypes." Those were the words of Clarence Thomas this past week as he spoke to the National Bar Association. Thomas' speech and appearance were controversial but his speech touched on one of the most discouraging aspects of our cultural malaise. That is our tendency to reduce the individual to a racial or ethnic characteristic.
When I was home in June, a friend and I were discussing our hometown's school board election. She asked me for whom I was voting. I told her the candidate, who was black. She answered that she was supporting him as well because of the diversity he would bring to the board, referring to his skin color. Her answer was yet another example of what Clarence Thomas was speaking about.
The candidate certainly would have brought diversity to the school board but not because of his skin color. His ideas were different. Could some of these ideas have arisen out of experiences as a black man? No doubt our ideas arise out of experiences tempered in some manner by color of skin or heritage, just as we are products of our familial situations. But my friend was buying into something much more insidious than this. In this view, the new racism, one's skin color equals character. Thus, by knowing someone is black, one knows the ideas and thoughts he will have (or should have). It is this new racism which has led to the continuous attacks on Clarence Thomas over his seven years in the public eye.
The contention is that Thomas, as a black man, should hold a certain creed. Because he diverges from this he is, as Malik Shabazz told the New York Times, "one of the greatest traitors in the history of our people." But how does any of this differ from the old racism? Was the old racism (still very alive in places) not based on a notion that all blacks were the same, inferior to whites, and because of this could be treated poorly? Now put in its place is something which differs possibly only in intention. In the here and now is the notion that blacks must think a certain way, as my friend indicated. At the same time is the continuing notion that blacks are inferior, that they are unable to succeed without help from government intervention.
In the end this does no justice to the individual. To rest the over-riding value of person in the color of skin hurts any chance of true racial reconciliation. In the place of culture founded from the interaction of individuals, comes a boxing-ring notion of black versus white versus Latino versus Asian. Each group fights things out and returns to its separate corner following the fight. Problems and difficulties become privatized; instead of being our American problems, things become (substitute the appropriate hyphenated Americans) problems.
The belief that groups cannot succeed without governmental help not only places one group as the hapless victim, it also provides a tense and suspicious environment in our companies and on our college campuses. Out of many white students' mouths comes the claim that so-so is only here because of his skin-color. The legitimate achievements of many become tainted by the insidious racism.
Finally, this new conformist view treats those who break from it as traitors. Thomas has often been accused of not thinking for himself, as being an Uncle Tom. Thus, he came before his audience this past week to stand up for himself (something he should not have to do). He told his audience that he refuses "to have [his] ideas assigned to [him] as though" he were "an intellectual slave." It might be high time that we refuse to be slaves to this new racism which has substituted race in place of one's ideas and character. Instead of being treated as objects defined by our skin color, we should turn to the realization that we are free subjects. By doing so we will have begun to rise from this cultural quagmire.
