Powell Misses a Chance to Rise Above ‘Isms’

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em--or at least talk to them. That should have been the Bush administration’s approach toward the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which begins Friday in Durban, South Africa. But instead, one living symbol of U.S. racial tolerance, Secretary of State Colin Powell, will not be attending.

The argument against high-level U.S. participation in the conference is that it will be a festival of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. And the critics are right; that’s exactly what it will be.

But were Powell to be there, the watching world would have seen the clash of various “isms” in a new light.

The global village would have seen, for example, that the accusation of racism, as it is often applied today, has become just another weapon in the various politico-rhetorical struggles of the times, with little or no connection to any plausible benchmark of justice or fairness.

According to Merriam-Webster, the word “racism” didn’t come into existence until 1936. The earlier term was “racialism,” often used in a value-free sense to describe a studying of the differences between peoples and races.

But Hitler and the Nazis poisoned the idea that race distinctions could be anything but invidious, and so racialism, with its anthropological connotations, fell into disuse.

In the U.S., the history of the word “racism” is bound up, of course, with the civil rights movement. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Americans were instructed that racism is what white Southerners inflict on black Southerners; in the ‘70s, the argument expanded as academics and bureaucrats proclaimed white-on-black racism to be the root cause of every inequality in the nation.

But then this bleakly binary portrait of U.S. society became more complicated, as new groups with new claims on the national conscience arrived onto the national stage. “Sexism” was coined in 1968 and “homophobia” the following year as women and gays demanded new civil rights. Meanwhile, immigrants arrived in record numbers, all bringing their own ethnic grudges.

In this new environment, African America changed. Consider, as one measure, the span of black leadership, as represented by three preachers over the last four decades, from the saintly Martin Luther King Jr. to the noisy Jesse Jackson to the defamatory Al Sharpton.

Sharpton may style himself as a moral force in the tradition of earlier black heroes, but he is much more of an ethnic boss, in the tradition of, say, James Michael Curley, leader of Irish Catholics in the first half of this century.

Like Curley yesterday, Sharpton today can point to legitimate grievances his people have suffered, but, like Curley also, his moral claim on the national conscience is sharply limited by his own personal flaws.

And while the accusation of racism still has much punch when hurled against whites, surely its special force wanes when some black entertainers turn it into an ironic art form.

Stanley Crouch, the black critic for the New York Daily News, has lamented this trend, which he labels the “new minstrelsy: the neo-Sambo, mugging or scowling in Trick Daddy’s ‘I’m a Thug,’ where gold teeth, drop-down pants and tasteless jewelry abound.”

In spite of all this racial-categorical confusion--or perhaps because of it--social relations in the U.S. are much improved. The U.S. today isn’t so much racist, but once again racialist; it’s an ethnic marketplace of claims and counter-claims in which no one group is uniquely on top and no group permanently at the bottom.

The ultimate goal is equal opportunity and tolerance, but getting to that requires the honesty that comes from historical experience, not from the false piety of peoples’ preening and protesting before the world media.

Colin Powell, descendant of slaves, now America’s top diplomat, could deliver an honest message on that same international stage. He could say plainly that countries still practicing genocide and slavery and repression are hardly credible when they throw around “ism” accusations.

Would it be a pleasant experience for Powell? No. Would he be booed and hissed? Probably.

But the United States should trust in its core idea that the truth sets one free. It’s worked so far here at home, and there’s good reason to think it might work in the future all around the world.