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Behind the euphemisms of national unity, of course, lies the problem actually on the mind of the Washington politicians – how to handle the social collapse of the black urban community. Yet, while it is true that most prominent kinds of suffering are concentrated disproportionately in certain black communities, it is not true that such suffering demands a “racial” response, or represents a “racial” divide. What it demands is an American response, based fundamentally on the empowering supposition that black folk in the cities are capable of self-government too.
I don’t know what President Bush will decide is the appropriate role for the federal executive to play in the never-ending Washington political posturing about race. But I do know what would be the most helpful role the president could play in turning our attention away from race, and toward real national unity. He should resolve to emphasize the truth – that what is healthy and strong in the black community has arisen from fidelity to the pursuit of happiness in the American tradition of decent personal and community self-government. He should strenuously resist the temptation to equate “racial” issues with issues of poverty and other social dysfunction.
President Bush’s commendable resolve to devote his administration to reversing national acquiescence in inner city social disaster must not be mistaken for agreement with the notion that black Americans are under systematic and debilitating assault because of their race. Nor must it be mistaken for the presumption that black Americans need external, paternalistic assistance in order to be strong and happy American citizens.
All of these misunderstandings are avoided only by a policy of highlighting respect for the real, and enduring, strengths of character and citizenship in the black community, and taking steps to allow those strengths to reassert themselves. While those strengths have been masked, in many ways, by the horrible history of destructive government “help” of the poorest black Americans in recent decades, the history and tradition of the healthy black American community is still available to set the needed example. In fact, the most powerful healing of a host of related “racial” issues could be accomplished if the President’s “Working Group on Uniting America” concentrates on putting forward the heroic example of black history in America as an example for all Americans.
Nothing deserves more attention, yet nothing has been more shamefully neglected in discussions in the media or on the political stage, than the heritage of the labor of American blacks to achieve the “American Dream” of moral dignity and self-government. Most manifestly, of course, this effort was suppressed by slavery itself. Then followed the decades of legal and semi-legal oppression of the freed slaves and their descendants. And in the last half of the 20th century these two eras of oppression were capped by the degrading and corrosive series of interventions constituting the “War on Poverty” and related efforts. In what was in many ways the cruelest blow of all, the American black community, which had survived slavery and its aftermath with moral integrity and individual dignity intact, was subjected to the degradation of a systematic scheme of perverse entitlements and ideology.
The secular servitude of the welfare state might as well have been cruelly designed precisely to achieve the effect it had on many – to ensnare them in dependency by drawing them away from the connections of family, church and local community that are always the real sources of human happiness, and which were for most black Americans finally on the brink of a period of open flourishing.
But these obstacles are not the crucial part of the history of black Americans – rather, the story of black America is the story of a people who would not abandon the dream of dignity, always cherished their understanding that real dignity comes from moral rectitude and from God, not from external circumstance, and who accordingly struggled with constancy and patience to build families, churches, businesses and communities of integrity. Attention to post-war social disorder in American black life has for too long diverted our attention from the centuries-long heroic black refusal to abandon the real American dream of human dignity, freedom, and self-government. It is the historic strength of the black family, the black church, and the black community, that should strike us, not the undeniable fact that these institutions suffer today real damage from external assault.
Most black Americans today live in the confidence that a life of exterior dignity and prosperity will be the natural consequence of decency of character and fidelity to duty. It is to this successful, decent, and happy black majority that we should look to see the real solution to the “problems of race” in America. But too often, when we talk about issues involving race or conditions among blacks, the old debunked stereotypes of blacks as dehumanized victims still prevail, even among black leaders who surely should know better by now. President Bush no doubt got a taste of this in his meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.
The problem is that the truth about black fidelity to moral principle, virtue and character doesn’t fit the victim’s role that black Americans have been forced to play in order to justify constant expansion of the liberal bureaucratic welfare state. It doesn’t fit the passion play of absolute annihilation and national redemption a “leader” like Louis Farrakhan evokes to appeal to black anger. It doesn’t fit the assumption of a white monopoly on traditional virtues that underlies the prejudiced and too-narrow national vision of some conservative thinkers and politicians.
The crucial fact is that this strength has not defined itself — whatever outsiders have said of it — in terms of resistance to oppression, or rage against injustice. The preeminent fidelity of black Americans was not simply to fight against others but to overcome obstacles to the establishment of cohesive moral community. Accordingly, black dignity has not been won from without in the struggle against oppression, but cultivated within in the pilgrimage toward the promised land that America offers in principle to all its citizens – the difference is subtle, but absolutely decisive. President Bush should remind the country that American blacks have truly been masters of the American dream, and that many remain so today. This message will not only help to reawaken empowering self-government among the needy; it will also renew the vigor of that self-government in the nation as a – united – whole.
American unity is rooted in our common national devotion to the principle that we are all equal in our God-given vocation to govern ourselves in decency and justice, and in our possession of the basic capacities necessary to that task. For this reason, it is a duty of all Americans to assert and reassert that the moral and social calamities that some portion of our society suffers are ultimately only resolvable by a renewed sense of moral purpose and resolve in the very communities that are suffering.
Whether from the left or the right, the only thing that can truly stand in the way of social renewal is some version of the old, and truly divisive, falsehood that some “kinds” of people are capable of moral adulthood and some are not. The left inflicts this falsehood on blacks when it designs “help” for them that despises their own authentic community institutions – family, church and neighborhood – by implying that those institutions are instruments of white oppression or otherwise corrupt. The right inflicts it by its implicit acceptance that conservative – American – moral and political principles of responsibility, decency and liberty will not be accepted in certain neighborhoods.
I’m not sure precisely what President Bush means by “compassionate conservatism.” But surely it means at least that we must think through the implications of our conservative political principles for those in need of help. In a way, the implication that conservatism has failed to be compassionate in the hands of some of its proponents is fair enough – there is sometimes little difference between the abstract confidence that people can take care of their own affairs, and the convenient refusal to concern ourselves with them.
But some conservatives have been thinking carefully about the duties of charity, and the demands of truth, in the political order for a long time. In fact, that’s what our Founders did above all – they sacrificed their own personal comfort and ambition to the great project of establishing a framework of government based upon the claim that the basic equality of human moral capacity was self-evident, and that the path to happiness for human beings was the path of moral responsibility freely accepted.
President Bush sought the White House with a promise to unite Americans under what he called a new banner of compassionate conservatism. And indeed it is compassionate to bring the truths of conservatism – American principle – to those who have not heard or understood them as well as they might. In addressing the “question of race,” the president should remind black Americans in distressed communities, as he should remind all Americans who are in need in this time of plenty, that the pursuit of moral virtue and decent character opens the door to all other things that are needful. This is the American faith, and it is the truth.
