By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Everyone is weighing in on the horrific murders in
Charleston and blaming the mindset of the mass murderer on wider social
pathologies. After the airing of the racist crackpot ideas of the unhinged Dylann
Roof, calls have gone out to ban the public flying of the battle flag of the
Old Confederacy, which has also been incorporated in various forms in four
state flags. Perhaps we should step back and eschew symbolism that separates us
by race rather than unites us as fellow citizens.
Aside from the specious argument that the flag, along
with media like Fox News and talk radio, fuels homicidal maniacs like Roof,
there is quite another question: whether implicit state endorsement of
Confederate symbolism offers sanction for the old idea of an apartheid nation,
and thus sends entirely the wrong message of American separatism rather than
unity. While many Southerners object that the flag simply proclaims the
battlefield honor of those who were defending their homeland, the Confederacy
was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today,
can invoke racial polarization. For every Southern patriot who understandably
sees in the Confederate battle flag the historical resonance of Pickett’s
Charge or the resistance to Sherman’s March to the Sea, there are probably just
as many who consider it a nostalgic icon of white supremacy. In a racially
diverse society, it makes sense to phase out state sanction for the battle flag
— as South Carolina governor Nikki Haley advocated yesterday, in calling on the
state legislature to vote for the removal of the battle flag that has been
flying over the grounds of the state capitol.
But perhaps we should not stop there, given increasing
ethnic tensions and widening racial fault lines. There are plenty of other
overt racialist symbols that separate Americans. One is the prominent use of La
Raza, “The Race” — seen most prominently in the National Council of La Raza, an
ethnic lobbying organization that has been and is currently a recipient of
federal funds. The National Council of La Raza should be free to use any title
it wishes, but it should not expect the federal government to subsidize its
separatist nomenclature.
The pedigree of the term La Raza is just as incendiary as
that of the Confederate battle flag. The Spanish noun raza (cf. Latin radix:
“root” or “race”) is akin to the now-discarded German use of Volk, which in the
early 20th century came to denote a common German racial identity that
transcended linguistic and cultural affinities: To be a real member of the Volk
one had to “appear” German, in addition to speaking German and possessing
German citizenship.
La Raza is just such a racialist term. It goes beyond a
common language and country of origin, and thus transcends the more neutral
puebla (“people”: Latin populus) or gente (“people”: Latin gens). Raza was
deliberately reintroduced in the 1960s to promote a racially superior identity
of indigenous peoples and mestizos born in the Spanish-speaking countries of
the New World. That is why the National Council of La Raza once had a close
affinity with MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), the infamous
racialist U.S. student group (its ironic motto is “Unity creates strength”),
some of whose various past slogans (cf. the Castroite derivative “Por La Raza
todo, Fuera de La Raza nada”) finally became sources of national embarrassment.
The use of the phrase La Raza reflects its illiberal
modern origins. It came into popular currency during the 1930s in Spain, when
the Fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco wished to promote a new Iberian
identity that went well beyond the commonality of Spanish citizenship and
fluency in the Spanish language. Franco expropriated La Raza to promote the
racist idea that the Spanish were a superior people by birth. He penned a
crackpot novel, Raza, embodying Fascist and racist themes of Spanish genetic and
cultural superiority. La Raza appeared on the big screen in the form of a hokey
1942 Spanish-language movie, full of racist themes, anti-Americanism, and
fashionable Fascist politics.
But Franco was only channeling another, more famous
contemporary Fascist, Benito Mussolini, who had his own Italian version of the
term, la Razza. In 1938 Mussolini published his Manifesto della Razza (“The
Racial Manifesto”), which defined Italians as a superior Aryan race and
excluded Italian Jews, Africans, and other supposedly less pure groups from
various positions in the Italian government.
In sum, the word “Raza” has a disturbing recent history,
and that is why Spaniards and Italians today have dropped its common usage. Yet
that well-known association with racial chauvinism was precisely why the
founders of the National Council of La Raza, by their own admission, reawakened
the word in the 1960s to focus on what they saw as a particular racial category
of Spanish speakers. But La Raza is now a calcified separatist slogan, one full
of implications that are unworthy of taxpayer support.
One wonders why in 2015 there is still nomenclature such
as “the Congressional Black Caucus,” over half a century after the civil-rights
movement sought to promote integration and the idea that Americans should be
judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.. The
Caucus ostensibly seeks to ensure the end of exclusion by race from full
participation in American society by creating a lobbying group focused entirely
on one particular race. The postmodern rationale is either that groups that
have suffered past disfranchisement and discrimination should not be subject to
current anti-discriminatory protocols, or that they should at least enjoy a
compensatory period of exclusion from color-blind values to offset centuries of
oppression.
Thus the group’s membership is entirely race-based. The
Caucus is not open to those members of the House of Representatives who are not
African-American, but who might share the Caucus’s racial or political agenda —
as the Jewish-American Representative Steven Cohen learned when he was elected
to Congress in 2006. The Lebanese-American Ralph Nader was once attacked at a
Caucus meeting in clearly racial terms on the understanding that the group was
exempt from charges of racism. How far is the racial concept transferable —
“the Asian Caucus”? “the Latino Caucus?” “the White Caucus?” “the
European-American Caucus”? The premise seems to be that African-American House
members seek to promote a common “black” agenda that transcends their local,
county, or state interests. If an Asian, white, or Latino voter’s congressional
representative is a member of the “Black Caucus,” does that mean that the voter
will receive less attention than a black voter — as de facto white caucuses in
the Old South most certainly did ignore the interests of their non-white
constituents? Is that why conservative African-American legislators who see all
their constituents in terms that transcend race tend to avoid joining the
Caucus? Could not the “Black Caucus” rebrand itself as the “Civil Rights
Caucus” or the “Progressive Caucus”?
Reexamination of the battle flag offers us a teachable
moment. Critics made a good point that any state sanction of the secessionist
flag inevitably sends the wrong message to millions of Americans, who in their
private lives are free to display any symbol they wish. But the current
racialist reaction to past racism has become equally indefensible in an
increasingly fragile multiracial state. The state should not support any
racially separatist symbols, titles, or groups.
We should pause to appreciate that the American
democratic experiment in ethnic and racial diversity is nearly unique. Indeed,
the very idea of racial diversity and nationhood does not have much of a record
of success in history. Few countries have been able to transcend their ethnic
origins and sustain a racially pluralistic society. Rome was an exception and
pulled it off for nearly 500 years, as the Roman Empire grew to encompass
non-Italian peoples from the Euphrates to Scotland before unwinding into tribal
chaos. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires worked for long periods, though
they relied on the use of autocratic force and imperial coercion to suppress
minorities, in ways antithetical to modern notions of governance.
In more recent times, religious and racial diversity — in
Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, or contemporary Nigeria — has resulted in
chaos and, occasionally, genocide. True, some nations have been able to
incorporate different tribes, as in the United Kingdom’s unification of the
various peoples of the British Isles, but usually after hundreds of years of
fighting and only when there were underlying racial and cultural affinities
that could trump tribal differences.
In other words, the United States is history’s exception,
not its rule. America is a great, evolving experiment of a constitutional
republic in which peoples of all different races, religions, and ethnic
backgrounds are equal under the law and see themselves as Americans first and
members of tribes second — appearance and religion being incidental rather than
essential to the American body politic.
In an America that was originally founded by mostly
Northern European immigrants, a Juan Lopez from Oaxaca is freely accepted as a
U.S. citizen in a way that a white Bob Jones would never fully be embraced as a
citizen of Mexico, a country whose constitution still expressly sets out
racially chauvinistic guidelines that govern immigration law. Someone who appears
African or European would have a hard time fully integrating as a citizen in
Chinese, Korean, or Japanese society, in a way not true of Chinese, Koreans,
and Japanese in America. The world assumes that in America a president,
attorney general, secretary of state, or Supreme Court justice can be black;
but it would be as surprised to find whites as high public officials in
Zimbabwe as to find a black as prime minister or foreign minister in Sweden or
Germany.
In the last half-century, Americans have increasingly
tended to emphasize race and tribe in promoting “diversity,” rather than
seeking to strengthen the more tenuous notion of unity with their fellow
citizens. We have forgotten that human nature is fond of division and must work
at setting aside superficial tribal affinities to unite on the basis of core
values and ideas.
Symbols, flags, organizations, and phrases that emphasize
racial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from
the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten
to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more
homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as
expected.
That would be a great tragedy, but a catastrophe entirely
predictable if citizens seek symbolic solidarity with their tribe rather than
in the common idea of just being American.
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