Why Bill Bennett is Stupid, But Not Racist

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, Berkeley Daily Planet. Posted October 10, 2005.

One of the problems about having an adult discussion about Bill Bennett's recent race remarks is that we simply don't have the words with which to conduct it.

And so, when former Reagan administration secretary of education and current self-appointed morals master of America Bill Bennett said on his recent radio broadcast that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could ... abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," many critics threw the terms "racist" and "racism" at him, having no better ammunition in their arsenal.

Bruce S. Gordon, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, issued a statement saying that "Bennett should apologize for racist comments made yesterday on his call-in radio show." And in a letter to the president of the Salem Radio Network of Irving, Texas which carries the Bennett radio program, Michigan Congressmember John Conyers wrote that "we simply cannot countenance statements and shows that are replete with racism, stereotyping, and profiling."

Mr. Gordon and Mr. Conyers made some of the more polite entries in the dialogue that followed Mr. Bennett's remarks. Underneath that, in blog exchanges and newspaper columns and radio commentaries, the two sides of the country's major right-left political split went at it, each side accusing the other of being the most "racist." Some conservatives, for example, accused the white liberal-left of "racism" for supporting abortion of African-American babies, a practice these critics suggested amounted to black genocide.

The confusion comes in part from the fact that both "racist" and "racism" are terribly flawed terms, so flawed, in fact, that we ought to simply throw them out and start all over again with new ones.

A first major problem is that for many people, the meaning of "racist" and "racism" were forever frozen on that summer Sunday morning at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in September of 1963 when members of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group placed a box of dynamite underneath the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, causing the horrific explosion that killed four black girls--Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins--and wounded 23 other African-American worshippers.

And so, in the mid-'60s, the term "racists" largely became used to describe white people who so hated black people that they would do murder even to innocent young children, just to get rid of us. This set the bar for who was a white "racist" so high that it now becomes almost impossible to fit anyone into it, including, for example, the president, who engineered the suppression of the African-American vote in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, but who clearly does not "hate" African-Americans, since he keeps so many around him.

By the time "racist" and "racism" began breaking out of that exclusive "hate black people" box, we discovered that it had been so broadened that it had now come to be applied by many people to anyone who sought to advocate for their own race to the exclusion of advocating for any other races. That led to the curious phenomenon--unintentionally? intentionally?--that under this new, expanded definition, many more African-Americans are now publicly called "racist" these days than are white people.

I do not know what is in Mr. Bennett's heart, but there does not appear to be evidence either through word or deed that he hates black people and wishes us dead. In addition, there does not appear to be anything in his record as either a public servant or a private morals advocate suggesting that he seeks to uplift the white race while seeking to hold down all the other races.

In addition, it is clear from even the most critical reading of his entire remarks that he never advocated that black children should be aborted (Mr. Bennett, as everyone knows, is adamantly against abortion in all forms, and among any people). He was actually having a conversation with an anti-abortion caller about the various social effects of abortion, and used the "black abortions would lower the crime rate" example to counter the caller's assertion that abortions over the past several years have removed many potential able-bodied persons from America's workforce, thus lowering the country's wealth. To show that he did not advocate the "abort every black person" position, Mr. Bennett went on to say that such mass black abortions "would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do."

J. Douglas Allen-Taylor writes for the Berkeley Daily Planet.

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