Gene Genovese was for several years a
colleague of mine at the
University of
Rochester. I had many administrative
dealings with him, as
he was Chairman
of the history department while I was Associate Dean for
Graduate Studies
and hence governor, as it were, of the budget for
graduate student
fellowships. But I also would see him
at the faculty
club, and in
fact we played poker together quite often at a regular game
at his house.
Since I also took an interest in history and
social questions I
was naturally an
opponent of most of what Genovese stood for in his
Communist
sympathies, but I didn't often argue with him, as he wouldn't
argue seriously
with people like me. He thought he
understood me, as I
thought I
understood him, so that it seemed that little needed saying. In
more recent
times, however, Genovese has left that cause, and while still
maintaining a
Marxist philosphy (as I have been led to believe) he has
become a
spokesman for a sort of new conservatism that doesn't really have
a name. I would venture to say that this new point
of view is much the
same as that
taken up earlier by Genovese's erstwhile enemy at Rochester,
Christopher
Lasch, but I might be missing a subtle point here.
When I read Genovese's remarks, reproduced
(in part) below, in the
right-wing
journal Chronicles, I was surprised to see that even in his
conversion he
had apparently continued to miss a point of some importance,
and so I wrote
the following letter to explain it. I
am glad to say it
received a
sympathetic and pleasant reply, a far cry from the sort of ironic
response my
comments in the faculty club used to elicit in the old days.
Department of
Mathematics
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
Rochester, New York 14627
Tel (716) 275-4429 or
244-9368
27
July 1994
Eugene D. Genovese
1487 Sheridan
Walk
Atlanta, Georgia
30324
Dear Gene,
This is what the computer does: I began by making a notation, as
I often do, of
things I have read, with reference, just in case I want it
later (not for
scholarship, which isn't my thing, but as an idea for
further
thought). So I took down the quotation
below and began my small
note on why I
thought that "political power" line was curious. But the
thing segué'd
into a longer comment, and finally what amounted to a letter
to you, for all
that you appear in the third person in what I wrote. So I
reproduce it for
your pleasure. Call it a fan
letter. I have been
following your
polemical career with great interest.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Eugene D. Genovese:
from The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience,
an article based
on his speech of acceptance of the 1993 Ingersoll
Foundation's
Richard M. Weaver Award, as printed in Chronicles, August,
1994.
[Arguing that
the difference between the black and other "immigrants"
makes their
problem unique]:
"...its uniqueness emerges from the
history of slavery and
segregation,
which confronted black people with a raw oppression and
exploitation
well beyond that experienced by European immigrants ...
Other peoples
contributed much to the development of an American national
culture, but
despite acute discrimination, they were not condemned as an
inferior race,
and they were able to progress and consolidate their gains
through the
steady accretion of political power. Not so for Africans and
their
descendants..."
What is curious about this passage is
the phrase, "to progress and
consolidate
their gains through the steady accretion of political power,"
with its casual
assumption that the accretion of political power has some
importance in
that context. Genovese is talking about
the disaster that
has recently
taken over the black community, that is, the emergence of an
underclass, not
to say criminal, culture, that is preventing their taking
an appropriate
place in American, or human, society.
But this disaster
has accompanied,
indeed followed, on the blacks obtaining a more than
proportional
political power. That underclass
mentality was not
overwhelming
their community in the days of Jim Crow.
Did political power
consolidate, or
did it prevent, their "gains"?
And to consider other groups: Was it a rise to political power that
caused the
progress, and consolidated the gains, of the Chinese, or
Japanese, or
(East) Indian groups in America? Or the
Jews? Who but the
Irish were the
leaders in urban politics in the large American cities
fifty to a
hundred years ago? And who (among the
whites) but the Jews
were forbidden
entry to clubs, suburban neighborhoods, medical schools and
the like? Yet did the Irish become scientists,
musicians, movie-makers,
artists and
big-businessmen in anything like the proportions of the Jews?
I do not make this comment to denigrate
anything else in Genovese's
analysis, for
his view of the problem of the blacks -- their problem and
ours, as
Podhoretz once put it -- is one I respect.
I only call attention
to this remnant
of old-left thinking, somewhere in a corner of the
Genovese
consciousness, that he really ought to extirpate. Political
power does not consolidate
social -- or even economic, or cultural --
gains, such as
they are. Liberty does it. Equality of opportunity -- or
at any rate some
opportunity -- makes the difference, and that's not the
same as having a
friend at City Hall, or in the White House.
Alas, I see this equality of opportunity
seriously compromised in
today's USA, and
I see the "awarding" of disproportionate political power
to the black
community as one sad manifestation of this disease. I do
wish we could
stick to the one-man-one-vote principle.
Let the blacks
segregate
themselves if they like, thereby gaining a majority in some
places (even as
the Chassidim have a majority in some places) if they
really want
one. But I have never felt
unrepresented because my
Congressman was
not a Jew. Moynihan and D'Amato,
goodness!
I would agree that a largely black
school district might want to
impose some
disciplinary rules that a largely white district might not,
and I wish all
school districts had more freedom from the state than they
have; but I'm
afraid that compulsory Christian prayer sessions is not in
the cards, even
if Christianity is a good discipline. I
find it hard to
see what
"autonomy" can mean, for the black community, beyond what it has
now. We all have it, in fact, to a large degree;
but private and voluntary.
We can send our
kids to Cheder, but we must not ask the state
to build some
because we can't afford enough of them. What is public has
to be neutral as
among definable subgroups, be they men (as against
women), homo (as
against hetero)(sexuality), Jew against Christian, or
black against
white. Inequality in the law instantly
leads to
manipulation,
with "all the advantages that theft has over honest toil."
That's what
started this all.
The white put-down of the black, from
slave times to today, has been
indefensible;
but it was not the cause of the collapse of Christian
morality,
parental responsibility, and the work ethic among blacks, which
is quite recent
and is seen enough among whites to deny the racism, or
former-slave,
thesis right there. What we are doing now is also terrible,
and a most
terrible irony that it is being done in the name of reparations.
If I were to make a rough and ready
prescription, I would say that
in the time of
the Messiah we shall beat our social workers into
policemen, and
then shall the lion eat straw like the bullock.
R