Revisiting a Controversial Book about Race
And the strange career of its author
In a previous post, I shared my thoughts on Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray’s 1994 book ‘The Bell Curve’. My thoughts were that, rather than a racially prejudiced charge against non-white Americans, it is a thoughtful and provocative investigation into the changing class stratification of American society. The book, however, did contain two controversial chapters where the authors examine the differences in average IQ scores across ethnicities (chapters 13 and 14). Imagine that a book exists which focuses on that issue, in addition to all the other hot-buttoned topics surrounding American race relations. You would end up with Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society.
Published in 1995 - a year after ‘The Bell Curve’ - the book raised the temperature of the race debate in America up to that of Mt. Vesuvius. This is remarkable, considering that even following the so-called ‘racial reckoning’ of the 2020s, D’Souza’s volume is mostly forgotten, whereas Murray still has to face allegations of racism for his text. What is remarkable also is that, while he is perceived these days as a caricature of the Right (see: the “documentary” 2000 Mules), D’Souza in the 1990s was regarded as a respectable scholar. His previous book, 1991’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, received praise from the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward. And as a conservative personality, he worked as a policy adviser under Ronald Reagan, as well as a Research Fellow at the premier D.C. think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI). His fall from grace is one I am still puzzled by, but I would speculate that it begins with the publication of, and the controversy surrounding, ‘The End of Racism’.
To summarize a 736-page book is a daunting challenge, but Ben Wattenberg - host of the PBS show Think Tank - did it nicely as follows:
“Racism is a historically recent and Western idea; America is not racist, but it used to be; today the biggest problem with the black community isn’t white racism, but black culture; racial discrimination can be rational; and the conclusion that Dinesh D’Souza reaches is that in order to set up a truly fair, multiracial society, all race-based government policies must be scrapped, including affirmative action, but private individuals should be free to discriminate.”
Where to begin? Here is what the great economist and race-relations commentator Glenn C. Loury has to say about the book:
[T]he book did make me angry. And one of the reasons it makes me angry is that it is insensitive… [It] is certain to provoke, to hurt, to anger, and to preclude the possibility of reasoned discussion. What [D’Souza] argues is that a certain cast of mind that he calls relativism prevents us from recognizing differences between cultures within America, like between black and white culture, prevents at least certain people from acknowledging the failings of black culture, and as a result, leads to a lack of civilizational capacities among people in the inner city, which he then goes on to characterize… in ways that I think are imprudent.
Professor Loury was so enraged by the book, as well as AEI’s decision to stand by its publication, that he severed his ties with the Institute and gravitated towards the Left, having previously been a Reagan Republican. According to Matt Continetti, our contemporary historian of the American Right, ‘An outrageous statement could be found on almost every page. “If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery,” D’Souza wrote, “what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” This sort of sentence was the author’s way of tossing credibility aside for showmanship.’ Here is another provocative zinger: ‘The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.’ And here is yet another one: ‘[V]iolence unleashed by blacks seems to have reached a point where it threatens the future of the African American community and the stability of society as a whole.’ Mind you, I had to double-check to make sure that this book was not ghost-written by Thomas Dixon Jr.
Among the many eyebrow-raising assertions, conclusions and rhetorical flourishes offered by the book, one stands out above the rest: the author’s proposal to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964, perhaps the greatest piece of legislation passed by U.S. Congress in the 20th century. ‘[T]he best way for African Americans to save private sector affirmative action,’ says D’Souza. ‘is to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964… America will never liberate itself from the shackles of the past until the government gets out of the race business.’ What began as a common conservative critique of race-based affirmative action somehow ended with a suggestion to undo the most significant achievement of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, while maintaining affirmative action in the private sector. Not only is D’Souza needlessly provocative in this regard: he is also wrong. As the landmark twin Supreme Court cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina show, race-based affirmative action in college admissions processes was deemed illegitimate based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not in spite of it. It says so in the Court’s opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Roberts:
For some time, both universities have decided which applicants to admit or reject based in part on race. Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either… The words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are not like mood rings; they do not change their message from one moment to the next.
For all his outrage-mongering, Dinesh D’Souza ends up where he deserves to be - as a sad footnote in the long, turbulent history of American conservatism. Nevertheless, one must wonder whether ‘The End of Racism’ will receive the same amount of attention if it was published today. My answer, I am afraid, will be disappointing: perhaps, but not for long.