Lionel Shriver: Change 80 years on ... America and Race
[Lionel Shriver is a London-based, American-born journalist and author.]
Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a black man is now poised to be nominated for president by one of America's two leading parties - and is, according to a Newsweek poll, an astonishing 15 points ahead of his Republican rival - should sit down with Scottsboro, a fine novel by Ellen Feldman published this month.
Obama's nomination proves America has come a long way since the 1931 trial of nine black men on fabricated rape charges
Meticulously researched, the book is based on an infamous Alabama court case that began in 1931. Two young white women of dubious virtue accused nine black youths of gang rape, though their story was entirely fabricated. Forensic evidence of the rapes was nonexistent; there were no witnesses. The women's stories were riddled with inconsistencies.
Despite one accuser recanting her charge, the state court system railroaded the boys through repeated appeals, two of which were overturned on technicalities by the federal Supreme Court. While "the Scottsboro boys" became a Northern cause celeb, Alabama's all-white juries were determined to avenge the violation of white womanhood and land the brutes in the chair. I won't spoil the story, aside from sharing what you must already sense: it ends sadly.
During my lifetime, American civil rights disputes have often degenerated to the petty, the shrill, and the over-sensitive. Whites have had to tiptoe through a linguistic minefield, dutifully transitioning from "Negro" to "black" to "Afro-American" to "African-American" (and I gather that we may be looping back to "black" again).
A few years back, at a public gathering, a white politician in Washington DC made the mistake of using the word "niggardly" in relation to an item in his budget, and there was a national outcry of indignation from the black community. The embarrassing foofaraw merely betrayed that most of these people did not know the meaning of this synonym for "stingy", which has no etymological connection to the N-word.
I have lived through all manner of racial nonsense - like the promotion of "ebonics" in California, an educational concoction that bent over backwards to justify the incorrect grammar and spelling of poorly educated black students as a separate language on a par with proper English.
Roundly counterproductive but always enforced to the letter, affirmative action (or, in Brit-speak, positive discrimination) in university admissions has had perverse effects - sometimes privileging the children of wealthy black professionals over the children of working-class whites, even if the disadvantaged white kids have higher test scores and better grades.
In recent years, some of the most vocal advocates for American blacks have been embittered opportunists who thrive on victimisation, and could even be called prejudiced themselves: Louis Farrakhan, or Al Sharpton, or Barack Obama's former pastor the Rev Jeremiah Wright. Having long demonised America as racist in the pulpit, Mr Wright must have been alarmed by the prospect of a black presidential candidate, whose nomination would undermine the pastor's aggrieved worldview. Thus this spring on national television, Mr Wright launched a verbal assassination attempt on his own parishioner...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a black man is now poised to be nominated for president by one of America's two leading parties - and is, according to a Newsweek poll, an astonishing 15 points ahead of his Republican rival - should sit down with Scottsboro, a fine novel by Ellen Feldman published this month.
Obama's nomination proves America has come a long way since the 1931 trial of nine black men on fabricated rape charges
Meticulously researched, the book is based on an infamous Alabama court case that began in 1931. Two young white women of dubious virtue accused nine black youths of gang rape, though their story was entirely fabricated. Forensic evidence of the rapes was nonexistent; there were no witnesses. The women's stories were riddled with inconsistencies.
Despite one accuser recanting her charge, the state court system railroaded the boys through repeated appeals, two of which were overturned on technicalities by the federal Supreme Court. While "the Scottsboro boys" became a Northern cause celeb, Alabama's all-white juries were determined to avenge the violation of white womanhood and land the brutes in the chair. I won't spoil the story, aside from sharing what you must already sense: it ends sadly.
During my lifetime, American civil rights disputes have often degenerated to the petty, the shrill, and the over-sensitive. Whites have had to tiptoe through a linguistic minefield, dutifully transitioning from "Negro" to "black" to "Afro-American" to "African-American" (and I gather that we may be looping back to "black" again).
A few years back, at a public gathering, a white politician in Washington DC made the mistake of using the word "niggardly" in relation to an item in his budget, and there was a national outcry of indignation from the black community. The embarrassing foofaraw merely betrayed that most of these people did not know the meaning of this synonym for "stingy", which has no etymological connection to the N-word.
I have lived through all manner of racial nonsense - like the promotion of "ebonics" in California, an educational concoction that bent over backwards to justify the incorrect grammar and spelling of poorly educated black students as a separate language on a par with proper English.
Roundly counterproductive but always enforced to the letter, affirmative action (or, in Brit-speak, positive discrimination) in university admissions has had perverse effects - sometimes privileging the children of wealthy black professionals over the children of working-class whites, even if the disadvantaged white kids have higher test scores and better grades.
In recent years, some of the most vocal advocates for American blacks have been embittered opportunists who thrive on victimisation, and could even be called prejudiced themselves: Louis Farrakhan, or Al Sharpton, or Barack Obama's former pastor the Rev Jeremiah Wright. Having long demonised America as racist in the pulpit, Mr Wright must have been alarmed by the prospect of a black presidential candidate, whose nomination would undermine the pastor's aggrieved worldview. Thus this spring on national television, Mr Wright launched a verbal assassination attempt on his own parishioner...