Civil Rights and Wrongs (I): Human Rights vs. the Civil Rights Act
Anne Wortham's classic proper-government look at the landmark 1964 legislation. by George Dance
(libertarian)
Saturday, June 12, 2010
As economics teaches, actions have unforeseen as well as foreseen consequences. A case in point is the recent "gotcha" (as Sarah Palin called it) of Republican Senatorial candidate Rand Paul, of Kentucky, by National Public Radio and MSNBC. (1) The affair, in which Paul's questioning of Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was equated by some with racism, may have been designed to put his political beliefs (and by extension those of both the Tea Party and the "proper government" wing of the rEVOLution) outside the bounds of civil discourse. At the same time, though, it has had the apparently unintended effect of allowing criticism of that Act (a hitherto sacred cow) back into the public discourse.
What is the "proper government" view of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? No one is more qualified to answer that question than Anne Wortham.
Who is Anne Wortham? From Michael Eden's superlative biography which introduces her 2008 essay on Barack Obama, "No He Can't":
Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association.... In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyers' television series, "A World of Ideas." The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas. Dr. Wortham is author of The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. (2)
Full disclosure: Prof. Wortham begins "No He Can't" by stating of herself that "I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president." (2)
The following is from Prof. Wortham's essay, "Individualism versus Racism," as printed in Tibor Machan's 1974 anthology, The Libertarian Alternative (Chicago, Nelson-Hall). (3) I have retained her text (except where indicated by ellipses), including her italics; but I have added the subheadings and some additional paragraph breaks.
Civil Rights 1789-1963
The Constitution of the United States was designed to protect the rights of the individual against trespass by other individuals, or by government. But the original code made no provision for the abolition of slavery or recognition of the Negro as an individual....
A Civil War was waged before the Thirteenth Amendment cleared the Constitution of a serious contradiction and established that, if men are to live as men, they must be free to do so. The Reconstruction era further clarified the extent to which states' rights could be practiced without interfering with the individual's human rights and without denying his civil rights. While these rights had been defined before, they had not been extended to Negroes...
By 1875, all questions concerning citizenship for Negroes in the United States, and their rights as individuals, were answered in the Constitution....
[C]ompulsory integration of the schools was no more required by the Constitution nor necessary for fulfillment of the human rights and civil rights of Negroes than had been the compulsory separation before 1954. Education is no more the business of the Federal government than is eating or dancing or the seating arrangement on a train or bus.
The Negro role in the civil rights movement gained impetus after the Supreme Court decision in 1954, and their main thrust was to the effect that Negroes had been deprived of their rights as a group. Scarcely anyone bothered to ask what rights inhere in groups or to stand in defense of the rights of the individual.
It seems safe to say that there were few individuals, if any, among the 210,000 marchers on Washington on August 28, 1963; and the net effect was a Congress and a nation made more race conscious than ever before.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The resultant Civil Rights Act of 1964 elevated the dubious principles of altruism, collectivism, and racism above life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness....
This new law of the land deals with eleven basic aspects of what the nation's legislators call civil rights: voting, public accommodations, public (governmentally managed) facilities, school desegregation, the Federal Civil Rights Commission, nondiscriminatory use of Federal funds, equal employment opportunity, voting census, a Federal Community Relations Service, civil rights court procedures, and jury trials.
A careful study of the detailed provisions of these 11 titles under the Act may reveal some minor clarifications of points already covered by the Constitution and existing legislation, as in Title 1 on Voting and Title 10 on Court Procedures. But these are hardly what the civil rights revolution was about.
For the most part, the major provisions of the new Act tend to arrogate powers to the Federal government, in the name of Civil Rights, that are none of the government's business because they have to do with regulation and control of what ought to be strictly private business relationships.
The overwhelming tendency of the Act is to deny the civil rights of producers -- property owners -- in favor of the wishes of those seeking something for nothing, making the Federal government the instrument of compulsion for the implementation of such injustice. Thus, the attempt to appease organized racists has invoked a condition of legislative enslavement on the entire nation -- and it will take a police state to enforce this condition.
(2) Eden, Michael, "‘No He Can’t’ by Prof. Anne Wortham," Start Thinking Right, Jan. 31, 2009. Web. June 12, 2010. http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/no-he-cant-by-prof-anne-wortham/
(3) Anne Wortham, "Individualism versus Racism", in Tibor Machan ed., The Libertarian Alternative. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974. 403-407. Print. http://www.amazon.com/libertarian-alternative-Essays-political-philosophy/dp/0911012729-
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Posted By: Logical Premise
Date: June 15, 2010 08:33:17 PM
Ah, yes, the redoubtable Randian black professor. Met her once. Wasn't very impressed.
My response to this is two fold. One to the actual statement by Rand Paul, which was actually a coherent, non-racist statement of belief, and one to this illogical screed by "Dr." Wortham.
1) Rand Paul's statement was, if I recall correctly, that he didn't like telling businesses, which are privately owned, what they could and could not do. The fact that the civil rights act does so bothers him because he feels that if you own a property, you should be able to determine who can and cannot use it.
I don't think that's a racist statement at all. I think it's rather naive, but it's not racist. Rand Paul is not a minority, so I have no expectation of him to comprehend how hurtful it must be to be turned away from a place of business based on the color of your skin.
That being said, there are parts of the Civil Rights Act I don't care for either, such as affirmative action, which enrages me. It is one thing to say "you cannot deny service or employment to someone based on race", because it points out the hateful ludicrosity of deciding you don't like someone due to the pigment of their skin. It's entirely another (and wrong) to say "you must hire X% black people or women or gays or whatever" because now you are just employing reverse racism.
Rand Paul is , of course, speaking about the application of the CRA in TODAY's society, and that's a key point, and one he's entitled to. He actually strikes me as quite reasonable. And he's just being truthful -- he's not comfortable with it. He didn't say he would get it repealed or go about whipping black people across the shoulders, for God's sake. When we live in a society where a person running for office is penalized for telling the truth, we need to give up on the media.
2) Anna Wortham's statement.
I don't even know where to begin. But I'll try. The first and most important difference is that she's referring to the CRA in the context of when it was passed. The time and days of the Civil Rights era, where black people were set upon by vicious dogs, lynched, chased away from voting booths, ghettoized, restricted from even using the SAME WATER FOUNTAIN as a white person. Keep that in mind, because what she says makes me want to slap her in the face.
Her premise seems to be that as long as she can only decide to view the civil rights debates and struggle through her little lens of philosophy, the actuality of what was occurring and leading up to the events that culminated in the civil rights movement can just be ... ignored. Her belief in the idea that altruism is somehow "bad" indicates very clearly that she never really understood or thought through the ramifications of what she put down.
Since most people don't have access to the essay's she's written, I will restrict myself to the quotes excerpted in the article.
"[C]ompulsory integration of the schools was no more required by the Constitution nor necessary for fulfillment of the human rights and civil rights of Negroes than had been the compulsory separation before 1954. Education is no more the business of the Federal government than is eating or dancing or the seating arrangement on a train or bus. "
Idiocy of the highest order. In other words, let us set aside reality -- that black schools were underfunded, that no matter how many changes to the law, state and local municipalities were unwilling to invest in improving or upgrading schools, and indeed, that tax dollars were often siphoned from poor minority districts to poor white districts. Let us ignore the fact that society had been forcibly separated for so long that most white children did not even know a black child and that they got all images and understanding of other races from whatever garbage their parents decided to tell them.
And of course, let's ignore the fact that buses, paid for with MY FATHER'S TAX DOLLARS, would not let him sit in the front. Explain to me how , in the context of society in the sixties, anything but the CRA could have FORCED America to change.
Ah, but that is indeed where we get to the reality. She is not stating that the CRA is wrong, she is really stating that the reality of the situation is less important than maintaining the "concepts" of the Constitution. She actually has the damned effrontery to say:
"The resultant Civil Rights Act of 1964 elevated the dubious principles of altruism, collectivism, and racism above life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
In a society where blacks were lynched and deprived of their life, throw in jail on trumped up charges and deprived of liberty, and ghettoized and told they were subhuman, lesser, inferior to deny any pursuit of happiness. The only possible reaction was an appeal to altruism, to make black people a collective that was part of society and integrated into it rather than set aside, and as for racism, well, the sheer gall of accusing the CRA of promoting racism in a society were people dressed up in white sheets and set people on fire is beyond belief.
I understand, intellectually, the garbage she is saying is built around this concept that "the government has no right to do X because the Constitution says they don't". But her actual statement, "The overwhelming tendency of the Act is to deny the civil rights of producers -- property owners -- in favor of the wishes of those seeking something for nothing, making the Federal government the instrument of compulsion for the implementation of such injustice", ignores three very important points.
1) Blacks and minorites were hardly allowed to be "property owners". They were only able to own small businesses, with no hope of obtaining loans beyond the black community itself, and they were certainly unable to enter and compete in the greater American society. She basically says, then, that the rights of white property owners to do what they wished was more important than the immorality of how State and Local governments allowed blacks to be mistreated.
2) The statement "in favor of those seeking something for nothing" is an insult to every minority who lived in those times. My grandfather owned a farm, where he ended up working from 4 AM to past sundown most days. He paid his taxes, ruinous as they were, and managed to sell his goods at local farmers markets for less than white farmers could sell theirs for, even though his produce was identical. He paid taxes and yet was unable to ride a bus where he wanted. When one of my uncles was falsely accused of molesting a white woman, and the Klan burned down his farm, the police beat him for reporting the crime, and tax assessors informed him that he had to pay the full land value in taxes even though his barn and animals were gone and his crop ruined. He wasn't "asking for something for nothing".
As far as the article writer goes, you should go ahead and include a statement about what the average black person thinks about Anne Wortham. She wrote a real nice piece on Obama revealing him for the crackpot nut he is, and the fact that people supported him basically for very racist reasons. Bully for her. Prior to that, a lot of her essays and writing have enraged other black intellectuals because she consistently and repeatedly puts for the concept that black people are asking for handouts and are victimizing themselves. That isn't to say some don't. Some , a great many, certainly do --- but she instead paints anyone who disagrees with her with that brush, and displays a stunning lack of intellectual honesty in order to prop up her view of what liberalism and black society should be like.
A quote from a blog page talking about her sums it up great:
"That's why we don't like her: we don't want to be told that we can do it for ourselves. I hope you can sense the sarcasm! We dislike her because she, in many ways, has chosen to look at only one side of the equation. It's not that we deny personal responsibility, but rather that we believe in seeing reality as it exists and have chosen to fight the bully instead of the underdog. Calling for personal responsibility won't fix reality when people who are racists aren't acting personally responsible. Forgive us for wanting to open doors to freedom and not merely get out of the way! "Hey, the door may be locked, there may be hurdles to surmount, and 100 boxes blocking your entrance, but you can make it if you work hard enough." Using this logic will leave an individual spending the majority of his or her life jumping hurdles and moving boxes. By the time he makes it through the door, it will be time to exit this world. This is the callous logic we are trying to move away from. Life/liberty is precious and we believe in making it possible for as many people as possible to enjoy the full extent of it. "We will focus on helping people reach their full realization of self. We will help (as in lend a hand) remove the hurdles and boxes so that you too can join in the blessings of life." This is the change that we as "America" desire, not change like Obama, but real change. Forgive us if we reject and abandon her and that stale ass argument and mindset that have dominated America for far too long."
