Fran Lebowitz on Race
In which the famously contrarian journalist spells it out in black and white
I came from a town where there were two races, black and white. There were a few Chinese people, and this may sound shocking, but I had no idea they were a different race. I thought they were a different nationality, like Italian or French. Now you have people coming here from Cambodia, from Egypt, from Colombia, from places you never thought would be sending us their huddled masses. I mean, surely 20 years ago no one could have imagined a more unlikely pair of words than “Korean deli.” And all these people think of themselves as being members of different races. Ethnic groups have taken on the same weight as racial groups, with the same demands, the same notion of themselves.
To me, this plays into the hands of the people in power — the white people. If you want to ensure generation after generation of Mexican gardeners in California, you insist on bilingual education in the grammar schools. You can pretend that you would just as soon have your cardiologist speak to you in Spanish, but if you don’t speak Spanish, you would just as soon not.
If you’re black, don’t you say to yourself, “We’ve been here for a zillion years, and here are all these people coming along, acquiring power by saying they’re powerless acquiring power by equating their lot with ours”? Blacks are the standard of oppression. People are always taking appalling historical events that one would hope are unparalleled and making absurd and immoral equations: the police raid the Stonewall Inn and instantly and forever it’s “Bull” Connor turning the fire hoses on the marchers in Birmingham; antiabortion maniacs throw fetuses at abortion-performing doctors and an absolutely unembarrassed analogy is made to a lynch mob. These things are categorically unrelated, as are most things. Things are very rarely exactly like other things. If they were, people would be less baffled in general, and perhaps less given to such statements as “This is like the Holocaust.” Nothing is like the Holocaust. Not that there haven’t been other tragedies, other genocides. But simply that they were peculiarly, specifically, intrinsically like themselves. Genocides are like snowflakes, each one unique, no two alike. You can’t go around making these horrendously invalid comparisons. It is disgraceful and annoying. If you were in Auschwitz, you undoubtedly feel that on top of having been in Auschwitz you shouldn’t also have to have your experience used to justify, say, gay marriage.
What is actually served by multiculturalism and all things attendant to it is the power of white people, and this, despite any and all such academic quibbling, is primarily accomplished by the continuing oppression of blacks. Because even though the conversation now includes all these other elements, the truth is that the farther you are from being black, the more likely you are to assimilate, to be more like white. The more you are like white, the less trouble you have because the more you are like white, the less trouble you are.
How do you think we should approach the topic of race in this country?
Clearly in some other way — in as other a way as possible — because if ever there was an example of something not working, this is surely it.
What are we doing wrong?
Well, first of all, by “we” I assume you mean the public, the public approach or the public discourse, which means the discourse that takes place in the media. And for the purposes of this discussion, let us imagine that the media is white and thus approaches the topic of race as if they (the white people) were the answer and them (the black people) were the question. And so, in the interest of fairness, they take their turn (having first, of course, given it to themselves) and then invite comment by some different white people and some similar black people. They give what purports to be simply their point of view and then everyone else gives their beside-the-point of view.
The customary way for white people to think about the topic of race — and it is only a topic to white people — is to ask, How would it be if I were black? But you can’t separate the “I” from being white. The “I” is so informed by the experience of being white that it is its very creation — it is this “I” in this context that is, in fact, the white man’s burden. People who think of themselves as well intentioned — which is, let’s face it, how people think of themselves — believe that the best, most compassionate, most American way to understand another person is to walk a mile in their shoes. And I think that’s conventionally the way this thing is approached. And that’s why the conversation never gets anywhere and that’s why the answers always come back wrong and the situation stays static — and worse than static.
Well, that’s part of the problem. What’s part of the solution?
The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it I be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.
It is now common — and I use the word “common” in its every sense — to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level.
Additionally, children of movie stars, like white people, have at — or actually in — their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents; they don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars. We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars. White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like — other white people. The owners. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.
Are black people cooler than white people?
The notion that black people are cooler than white people is one that I am instinctively repelled by because it is adolescent, not only in content but also in form — it’s a teenager’s idea of an idea. It’s the moron in the oxymoron. In this case, however, I think it is true. Not because of the obvious, even blatant coolness of such black inventions as jazz, or fun, or a certain kind of stylishness in dress, but because coolness is a sensibility, and sensibility, at least in this country, has chiefly been the province of the marginalized rather than the oppressed — an example being the homosexual invention of camp. Oppression is usually so annihilating that it destroys the very possibility of sensibility. The invention of cool, the invention of a sensibility, by people who are so oppressed is in itself conclusively cool. They were literally cool enough in the face of the heat of oppression to invent a sensibility, one that is in every respect as rarefied, as ornate, as redolent of connoisseurship as camp, and, unlike homosexuals, they kept it even when white people took it away and made it square. When straight people took camp away and made it square, homosexuals couldn’t wait to join them in their squareness — to beat them to the punch. Who are now the most square people on earth? Who are the only people left who want to go into the army and get married? Homosexuals. Black people stayed cool even when white people stole it and made it square. That’s undeniably cool. And that’s what good sports black people are. With oppression staring them in the face, they averted their gaze and invented cool. Of course, as usual, they didn’t do it on their own — they needed sunglasses.
There is a lot of opposition to affirmative action, even among liberals. What do you think is the basis of this?
Well, some of it is simple racism and some of it is complex racism. By complex racism I mean the kind that argues for the color-blind society — the kind that is mendacious, that is corrupt, that harbors a little white lie. First of all, it is disingenuous at this point in time to equate race with mere color. The opportunity for that is long since gone. Initially, it was true that the only difference between blacks and whites was skin color, but the experience of centuries of racism has made that idea utopian.
Second of all, it should be more than apparent to anyone who has ever had occasion to observe the travel attire of the average American family as they snack their way toward the departure gate that a color-blind society is something we already have. A race-blind society is something we don’t.
And since we don’t, we need some kind of affirmative action I am suspicious of the insistent and incessant focus on the exceptional. The endless discussion of law-school applications. The ceaseless debate regarding admission to medical school. Always the attention is placed on the gifted black person. So whites can point to these people and say, Yes, there’s been historical progress. Yes, it is true that 50 years ago a black person with the I.Q. of Isaiah Berlin would have been a janitor, and now look: we’ve solved the problem of what to do with the black geniuses — they have the same opportunities as the white geniuses. But we don’t need affirmative action for these people and we never did. The problem of the talented tenth was actually solved by the civil-rights movement. It is to create parity between the untalented 90th and its white counterpart that we require what are perversely called racial preferences — I say perversely because surely we all know which race is genuinely preferred, talented or not. We will have equality when dopey black people get into Harvard because their chair-endowing grandfathers went there. We will have equality when incompetent black people buy their way into the Senate. We will have equality when larcenous black union plumbers start not showing up in greater and greater numbers. We will have equality when the unjust deserts and ill-gotten gains are spread around impartially. One Clarence Thomas is not enough.
Source: Vanity Fair, Oct. 1997
Triangle Free Press, November 2007
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