Pat Scrivener

If there is one issue on which I agree with Cornell West completely on but which I have
rarely seen discussed in other such high-profile works, it is on the ineffectiveness of liberalism to
solve Americas race problem in any meaningful capacity. The liberal notion that more
government programs can solve racial problems, West says, is simplistic -- precisely because it
focuses solely on the economic dimension. (4-5) The victim-blaming arguments of conservative
behaviorists are clearly problematic, but the shortsightedness and, dare I say, cowardice of liberal
structuralists is preferable only because it does not as actively degrade Black Americans.
Government regulations and welfare programs are not the panacea for poverty and racism that
many liberals trumpet them as; they are only a stopgap to prevent the complete devastation of the
Black community, but which nonetheless still destabilize that very same community. (87) I am
more comfortable placing the blame for this directly at the feet of White liberals who avoid
supporting meaningful reforms because to do so would mean undermining the capitalist
institutions that grant them their privilege; they would rather deaden some of the pain and call it
progress than try to cure the disease itself. As I found the reading of Race Matters to be a
polarizing experience. West and I differ on such a fundamental level that while I am not in a
position to really disagree with his assessment of facts, I find his optimistic commitment to
nonviolence and integration with the White community to occasionally border on the
insufferable, and he never successfully won me over on any position I did not initially see the
merit in. A passage of his which really bothered me was his psychologizing of Malcolm Xs
resistance to cultural hybridization as being the result of his insecurities about his own biracial
identity (145-146), which struck me as being both shockingly uncharitable and ignoring a point
he had made about interracial relationships in an earlier chapter: that [t]the history of such
access up to [the 1960s] was primarily of brutal white rape and ugly white abuse. (120-121)
While Black nationalist ideology is marred by faults, I do not believe that West gives adequate
attention to why Black nationalists would be so wary of hybridization: that it has not (and
arguably still does not) occur on an equal basis, that the rapacious White-dominated market
culture is still eager to steal whatever it can commodify and destroy that which it cannot. In his
commitment to radical love, I feel that Cornell West is too forgiving of White people. I can only
ask: Why? What have White people done to earn anything but the most singular, individual of
forgivenesses? Why should a people honestly be expected to harbor anything but hate for those
whose entire community in predicated on their genocide?