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.
 44 ® Paved With Good Intentions rakhan's Nation of Islam
and had worn a button supporting a separate nation for blacks. She
insisted that society was to blame for all the ills of blacks, and she
persuaded the other jurors not to send another young black man to
jail. The defendant has since been indicted on another first-degree
murder charge. This murder victim, like the previous one, was
black.118 In the Bronx, in New York City, defendants and jurors are
overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Prosecutors and police who
appear as witnesses are overwhelmingly white. Bronx jurors now
have a firm reputation for doubting the testimony of police and
letting off black and Hispanic defendants. A Bronx district attorney
remembers the way it used to be: "When I started in this office,
twenty years ago, the strongest case you could have . . . was when
all your witnesses were police officers. Now, sadly, it's the weakest."
Says another prosecutor: "If you have a case involving cops, you are
almost certain to lose."119 If the situation were reversed, and white
juries were routinely doubting black policemen and letting off white
defendants, there would be a deafening outcry. One of these Bronx
cases was that of Larry Davis. He wounded six policemen in a shoot-
out, but in 1988 a jury of ten blacks and two Hispanics acquitted him
of attempted murder. He was nevertheless convicted of illegal
weapons possession and sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison.
When his sentence was announced, his supporters chanted, "Never
give up. Free Larry Davis. We gotta right, black power, we gotta
fight, black power." In a speech afterward, Mr. Davis said that the
presiding judge had "violated the law countless times" during the
trial, and proclaimed, "There is no justice for the African-Latino
people." Mr. Davis, a convicted felon like all four of his brothers,120
then went on to face different charges for two separate murders, a
kidnapping, an assault, and a car theft.121 On almost the same day
that Mr. Davis was sentenced, the first black to be appointed to the
elite, ninety-four-man Texas Rangers police squad said he looked
forward to the day when the press stopped paying attention to his
race. A forty-one-year-old professional lawman, Lee Roy Young said
that he had never suffered discrimination nor seen others
discriminated against.122
 Racism 45 Campus Racism Why does America prefer to
believe a convict, Larry Davis, rather than a Texas Ranger, Lee Roy
Young? As we shall see, there are a number of reasons for this, but
universities play an important role in establishing and spreading the
view that white people are racist and that it is white racism that
accounts for the failures of nonwhites. College professors and
administrators tend to be far more politically liberal than the
population at large, and at many universities the search for racism
and the struggle to eliminate it are pushed to the point of ideological
excess. Although a college education should encourage reflection
and discourage hasty judgments, universities are even more closed-
minded on the subject of race than the rest of society. Academics
have created an atmosphere in which the slightest statement or
gesture is analyzed for potential "racism," and deviations from
orthodoxy are swiftly punished. The new mood of heightened
sensitivity has been accompanied by what is said to be a worrying
"resurgence" of campus racism. Media reports about race on campus
hew to conventional doctrine and generally imply that racist
incidents are all perpetrated by whites against blacks. This is, of
course, not the case. For example, four black football players at the
University of Arizona went to jail for hunting down solitary whites
and beating them up. Three of the blacks were on scholarships, and
the biggest was a 6-foot-4, 255-pound lineman.123 Brown University
was considering asking for help from the FBI when, in the opening
weeks of the 1989 school year, whites were attacked by urban blacks
on sixteen different occasions.124 Eugene McGahen, a white
freshman attending the historically black Tennessee State University,
was beaten in his room by a group of blacks with covered faces.
Brian Wilder, another white freshman at the same university, took to
carrying a knife and sleeping with a baseball bat after receiving
death threats and being told by blacks that they would "get"
him.125 *
 46 ® Paved With Good Intentions By contrast, some of the
"racism" attributed to white students sounds exceedingly tame.
During a late-night bull session at Southern Methodist University in
Dallas, a freshman reportedly said that Martin Luther King was a
Communist and then proceeded to sing "We Shall Overcome" in a
"sarcastic" manner. The university made him do thirty hours of
community service at a local minority organization. A graduate
student reportedly called a classmate a "Mexican" in a "derogatory"
manner after an intramural football game. Presumably he could have
called him any number of obscene names and not been punished,
but "Mexican" got him thirty hours of service also.126 At Harvard,
insensitivity was nipped in the bud when the dean for minority
affairs learned that dining hall workers were planning a "Back to the
Fifties" party. The fifties were segregated, argued the dean, so such
a party would smack of racism.127 At TUfts University, a student
was put on academic probation for saying "Hey, Aunt Jemimah" to a
friend who was wearing a bandanna. A bystander was offended and
brought charges against the student for violating the college speech
code. The university's reasons for punishing the student were murky
at best: "We did not find evidence to support [the] accusation [of
harassment], nevertheless we decided [the student] still had no right
to make the remark."128 In 1989, thirty fraternity members from
the University of San Diego were discovered by a park ranger as
they were burning a cross in a nature preserve. They were quickly
hauled before the college authorities, to whom they explained that
this was part of their initiation ritual, which was based on Emperor
Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Each pledge was to make a
list of his faults and burn it in the cross's fire. The university was
eventually made to understand that the ritual had no racial
significance at all. Nevertheless, the fraternity was put on probation
for three years, forced to abandon the ritual, and its members each
made to do twenty-five hours of community service. Just for good
measure, every member of every fraternity and sorority on campus
was made to attend workshops on racism.129 This is "tolerance"
taken to an intolerant limit. Most reports of campus racism are of
this kind of thing or of
 Racism ® 47 racial graffiti. Anything more than verbal
abuse is extremely rare. Furthermore, a number of university
administrators wonder if some well-publicized cases of anonymous
graffiti have not been the work of minority students who think they
can profit from the white breast-beating that inevitably follows.130
Some cases of racial "harassment" are pure play-acting. Sabrina
Collins, a black student at Emory University in Atlanta, gained
national attention when she received death threats in the mail, her
dormitory room was repeatedly ransacked, and racial insults were
scrawled on the walls and floor. She was so traumatized that she
curled up into a ball and refused to talk. An investigation showed
that the episodes began just as Miss Collins came under
investigation for violating the school's honor code and that she
probably staged everything herself. The head of the Atlanta chapter
of the NAACP said that so long as the incident highlighted the
pressures that blacks face on mainly white campuses, "it doesn't
matter to me whether she did it or not." University officials, just as
incoherently, agreed that worrisome questions about white racism
had been raised, whoever was responsible.131 Whites are so
zealous in their search for bigotry that even a hoax is cause for
anguished soul-searching. In this atmosphere, colleges all over the
country are rushing to combat racism, real or imagined. One of the
most common steps has been to ban what is usually called "hate
speech." According to one count, by 1990 there were 137 American
campuses that banned certain kinds of speech.132 Speech codes are
essentially based on the assumption that whites are racist,
nonwhites are not, and the latter must be protected from the former.
Some universities are explicit about this. At the University of
Cincinnati, the student handbook states that blacks are incapable of
racism. Thus when a mixed group of black and white students
insulted some Arab students during the Persian Gulf War, the whites
were quickly convicted of racism by the student senate. The blacks
were above the law.133 Most speech bans are written so as to apply
to everyone, but most people understand that they will usually be
invoked only against white students. Some are so broad and so
vague that they have been struck down by the courts. At the
University of Michii
 48 ® Paved With Good Intentions gan, a rule was passed
that prohibited students from, for example, venturing the opinion
that women may be inherently better than men at understanding the
needs of infants, or that blacks may be naturally better at basketball
than whites. A student filed suit, claiming that the regulation
prohibits legitimate research, and his view was upheld by a federal
judge.134 A federal court has also struck down a speech code at the
University of Milwaukee.135 In 1987, the University of Connecticut
established what was probably the most bewilderingly broad
"sensitivity" code at any school in the country. In addition to the
usual slurs, it forbade "inappropriately directed laughter" and
"conspicuous exclusion [of another student] from conversation."
Only after a student sued the university did it limit its speech ban in
1991 to words "inherently likely to provoke an immediate violent
reaction."136 Speech codes may well increase tension and edginess
rather than relieve them. A student at the State University of New
York at Binghamton complains that "If you look at someone funny,
it's a bias incident."137 One university, Brown, has already imposed
the heaviest possible penalty — expulsion — on a student who
violated its speech code. In a drunken outburst to no one in
particular, a white football player, Douglas Hann, let fly with a series
of obscene insults about blacks, Jews, and homosexuals. When a
black student approached him to complain, he reportedly told her
that his people owned her people.138 Loutish though Mr. Hann's
behavior was, Brown has hardly distinguished itself by expelling a
student for expressing opinions. There is some question as to
whether speech restrictions are even legal. Some experts have
argued that publicly funded universities cannot restrict speech and
must abide by the terms of the First Amendment, whereas private
colleges have more latitude. Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois
would like to settle the question once and for all. In March 1991, he
introduced legislation in Congress that would outlaw speech
codes.139 In any case, it is a sad day when our universities, which
supposedly promote academic freedom and unrestricted inquiry, are
binding their members with tighter restrictions than does society at
large. In such an environment it is no surprise to learn that
 Racism ® 49 students keep unfashionable opinions to
themselves. In 1991, one professor found that students at New York
Law School would criticize affirmative action only if they were
assured their opinions would be anonymous. On the record, they
were all in favor of it.140 Entire courses have been dropped in the
name of "racial sensitivity." Reynolds Farley, an acclaimed
demographer at the University of Michigan, stopped teaching a
popular undergraduate course, Race and Cultural Contact, after he
was criticized for racism. His offense was to have read in class a self-
deprecating passage written by Malcolm X, and to have discussed
the southern arguments in defense of slavery. "Given the climate at
Michigan," he says, "I could be hassled for anything I do or don't say
in that class."141 Other faculty members at Michigan have cut
discussion of race-related subjects from their courses for fear of
attack.142 Administrators come under just as much scrutiny as
professors. In early 1992, 250 faculty and students at the City
University of New York (CUNY) filed a racism suit claiming
discriminatory spending. They argued that the State University of
New York (SUNY) was getting more public money per student
because it had proportionately more white students. Indeed it was;
about 10 percent more. Was this proof of racism? The state
university maintains expensive medical, dental, and technical
schools. When these were taken out of the calculations, the city
university was actually receiving more public money per student
than the state university.143 One increasingly common way to
combat alleged campus racism is to make all students take courses
designed to sensitize them to the plight of minorities. In 1991, the
University of California at Berkeley started making students study
the contributions of minorities to American society.144 English
Composition is the only other campuswide requirement.145 The
University of Wisconsin campuses at Madison and Milwaukee, New
York State University at Cortland, the University of Connecticut, Penn
State University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College
have also instituted race-relations requirements in the past several
years.146 Courses like these often put the burdens of guilt and
responsibility squarely on whites. As one satisfied student at
Southern Methodist University put it, the purpose of a race-relations
course
 50 ® Paved With Good Intentions he was taking was to
show that "whites must be sensitive to the African-American
community rather than the other way around."147 At Barnard
College, teachers who assign readings from the works of "minority
women" get cash rewards paid for by grant money.148 The Ford
Foundation recently announced grants worth $1.6 million to nineteen
different schools to "diversify" faculties and course content.149 Many
colleges that have not set up required courses make do with
specialized orientation. There are no blacks at all at Buena Vista
College in Storm Lake, Iowa, but it feels it must also combat racism.
Special seminars are held every year. In addition, freshmen were put
through a month-long immersion course on racism in 1990. At least
one student was so struck by what he was taught that he reportedly
wanted to travel to other parts of the country to see racism
firsthand.150 One wonders exactly what he expected to see. In April
1987, Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, commissioned a
Task Force on Racism in response to incidents reported on other
campuses — there had been no complaints at Wellesley. The task
force duly reported that Wellesley was "covertly racist," so it
committed itself to hiring more minority teachers, and now requires
freshmen to take a course in non- Western culture.151 Harvard
University recently put on a week-long program of AWARE seminars
(Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism). John Dovidio,
the keynote speaker, explained that all white Americans are racist,
15 percent overtly so and 85 percent more subtly. A black speaker,
Gregory Ricks, explained that Ivy League colleges deliberately sap
the confidence of blacks, and wondered if they were not practicing a
particularly devious form of genocide. One professor suggested that
teachers should edit out any facts from their lectures that might
offend minorities, because "the pain that racial insensitivity can
create is more important than a professor's academic freedom."
Another professor agreed that teachers should have less freedom of
expression than other people, because it is their duty to build a
better world. Finally, Lawrence Watson, cochairman of the
Association of Black Faculty and Administrators, had this advice for
minority students: "Over 
 Racism ® 51 reacting and being paranoid is the only way
we can deal with this system. . . . Never think that you imagined it
[racial insensitivity] because chances are that you didn't."152 Racial
sensitivity can take many forms. The University of Michigan marked
the 1990 celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday with a series of
vigils, seminars, and lectures that involved virtually every
department. Some of the offerings were nothing short of heroic. The
classical studies department gave a talk called "Ancient Greece and
the Black Experience," and the nuclear engineering department
sponsored a session called "Your Success Can Be Enhanced by
Positive Race Relations." The School of Natural Resources gave a
lecture on "Environmental Issues and Concerns: The Impact on
People of Color." University president James Duderstadt says, "We're
reinventing the university for twenty-firstcentury America."153
Racism at Stanford Stanford University has also been reinventing
itself. It conducts intensive "sensitizing" seminars and requires them
for all freshmen. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1988 Stanford was one
of many campuses said to be afflicted with white bigotry.
Newspapers and magazines repeatedly referred to a notorious
"poster" incident, but they never explained what had happened. The
episode is worth a close look. Ujamaa House is Stanford's African-
theme residence hall. In 1988 more than half of its 127 students
were black. One evening in October there was a hallway discussion
among undergraduates. One was a black, whom we will call QC. At
one point QC claimed that all music in America has African origins.
One of the whites asked about Beethoven. QC shot back that
Beethoven was black. Several white freshmen, one of whom we will
call Fred, openly doubted that. Later that evening, Fred found a
Stanford Orchestra poster with a big picture of Beethoven on it. With
a crayon, he gave Beethoven an Afro and black features, and hung
the poster outside QC's
 52 ® Paved With Good Intentions room. QC found it the
next day and was "flabbergasted." Another black Ujamaa resident
called it "hateful, shocking" and said she was "outraged and
sickened." Though he had heard no reaction to the poster, Fred, who
lived in the dorm next door to Ujamaa House, began to worry that it
might have given offense. He went to his teaching assistant for
advice, but the T/A suggested he do nothing. "Let it blow over," he
said. Meanwhile, someone scrawled the word "niggers" across a
poster advertising a dance at a black fraternity. Coming on top of the
Beethoven poster, this caused much fury at Ujamaa House. A black
resident T/A who suspected that Fred had defaced at least the
Beethoven poster, went to Fred's room to ask him about it. To scare
the truth out of him, the T/A said that Ujamaa students were talking
about beating him up. Fred promptly admitted marking up the
Beethoven poster. It was clear he had had nothing to do with the
"niggers" poster. After an abusive grilling by the staff members of
Ujamaa House, Fred decided that he would publicly explain his
motives the day after next. About a hundred people were at the
meeting, including a thirtyeight-year-old black residential dean who
was involved with minority affairs. Fred explained that when he first
came to Stanford, he was shocked and offended by the emphasis on
race. He said he had come from a multiracial environment but that
race was not the central fact of life. He said he disliked what he
called "ethnic aggressivity" and that the campus obsession with race
was "stupid." A friend had been upset to meet a black student who
insisted she would not consider marrying anyone but another black.
He said he had defaced the Beethoven poster because it was a
"good opportunity to show the black students how ridiculous it was
to focus on race." He said the poster was "satirical humor." A black
student interrupted: "You arrogant bastard. How dare you come
here and not even apologize. I want an apology." Fred made a
perfunctory apology, which the blacks did not accept. There was
then a clamor that Fred be expelled from the neighboring dormitory.
The black dean came to Fred's defense and argued that the
Beethoven poster was not a big deal, that Fred should stay. The
dean said he had dealt with much worse than that in the
 Racism ® 53 sixties. The black students then turned on the
dean, and attacked him repeatedly in a "loud and insulting manner."
They later claimed that the dean had "stabbed them in the back."
QC stood up to attack the dean. He said it was arrogant of the dean
to downplay the Beethoven poster and said he could not tolerate
having Fred live next door. He accused Fred of "dogmatic racism"
and of having used the poster to insult him personally. After a few
minutes of this, QC started crying and moved toward Fred. He
shouted something to the effect that in Chicago, where he was from,
he could kill Fred for a thing like that. He then lunged at Fred and
collapsed. Six or seven students carried him out of the room, "crying
and screaming and having a fit." The meeting then went to pieces,
with about sixty students crying, some screaming, and others in a
daze. In the midst of all this, some of the students continued to
argue heatedly with the black dean, who finally agreed to expel Fred
from the residence next door. The meeting finally ended. TWo days
later, two of the white residents at Ujamaa found notices pushed
under their doors that said: "Nonblacks leave our home/you are not
welcome in Ujamaa." The same notice appeared on the bulletin
board. Also that day, someone defaced the photo display of the
freshmen in Ujamaa by punching holes in white faces. Several days
later, a few signs turned up around campus that read: "Avenge
Ujamaa. Smash the honkie oppressors!"154 This, in summary, is the
"racial incident" that added Stanford to the list of campuses where
white racism is on a dangerous upswing. In fact, the most poignant
character in this sorry tale is the black dean. It is certainly ironic to
have struggled to get where he is, only to be attacked by students
half his age because he would not admire the depth of their
suffering at the hands of "dogmatic racism." Six months later,
Stanford released a 244-page report on campus race relations.
Because of incidents like the one at Ujamaa House, the report called
for thirty new minority faculty, double the number of minority
graduate students, twice as many courses on American race
relations, and an obligatory undergraduate course in ethnic studies.
The president quickly agreed to hire the
 54 ® Paved With Good Intentions thirty new minorities and
double the number of minority graduate students, and promised to
study the other proposals. Not satisfied with this, the Stanford
Students of Color Coalition took over the president's office and
would not leave until the police arrested them. The poster incident
was on their lips.155 In one of the postmortems that followed the
takeover, a spokesman for the United Stanford Workers union
accused the university of "wall-towall discrimination."156 The
Beethoven poster incident took on a life of its own. Local
newspapers referred to it repeatedly, as did The New York Times.
Seven months after the fact, The Times was still dragging it out as
the decisive example of white bigotry at Stanford.157 Harper's
magazine denounced it.158 It popped up again, a full year later, in
Newsweek,159 and yet again, eight months after that, in The New
York Times.160 Its most recent known appearance was in the ABA
Journal of July 1990.161 It refuses to die. Why is it that the
Beethoven poster continues to be national news while the Arizona
football players who went to jail for assaulting whites were scarcely
heard of and quickly forgotten? Stanford, along with many of our
finest universities, has lost its bearings. Nevertheless, these schools
are only reflecting the received wisdom of the day — that white
racism is responsible for all the troubles that afflict black people.
Universities are therefore determined to root out not only white
racism but also the merest hint of what someone might construe to
be white racism. The final step is to curtail debate and even
suppress the truth if the truth might hurt feelings. Universities are
thus helping build a society in which only certain views are
legitimate and dissent is discouraged. Amid all the talk of surging
campus racism, the Carnegie Foundation actually spent a year
studying it and published a report in the spring of 1990. It surveyed
five hundred officials who are involved in the quality of student life,
and asked them about trends in racial harassment on their campuses
over the past five years. Eleven percent of the officials thought the
problem was worse, while slightly more — 13 percent — thought it
was less of a problem. Thirty-five percent said there had been no
change, and the largest number of all — 40 percent — said it was
not a problem at all. When the officials were asked how many racial
or ethnic incidents there
 Racism ® 55 had been on their campuses in the past year,
fully 78 percent said there had been none, and 12 percent said there
had been one. That left 10 percent who reported there had been
more than one.162 It does not sound as though there is a raging
problem that can be cured only with required courses in race
relations. But the findings do suggest why an ambiguous incident
like that of the Beethoven poster was so widely reported: There is
not much else to write about. If the charge of pervasive white
racism is to stick, there must be examples of it. The same incidents
can be written about over and over if necessary. Racism at Every
Turn It is not only at universities, on the job, or at the hands of the
police that blacks are said to face systematic discrimination. It is
often claimed that they face it at every turn. Housing segregation,
for example, is frequently cited as evidence of racism, and there is
no question that many blacks live in all-black neighborhoods.
Douglas Massey, who is the director of the University of Chicago's
Population Research Center and has studied housing patterns,
explains it this way: "discrimination in the housing market,
discrimination in the lending market and the prejudice of whites."163
Mr. Massey may be a little hasty. The only accurate way to study
housing prejudice is to send black and white applicants, under
identical circumstances, to investigate the same housing
opportunities. If the black is treated differently, it is presumably
because of prejudice. The Commission on Human Rights of the state
of Kentucky actually conducts studies of this kind. In a 1989 survey
of fifty apartment complexes in seven cities, it found that blacks got
different treatment in 9.8 percent of the time. That is 9.8 percent
too often, but it means that whites and blacks were treated
identically 90 percent of the time.164 The Urban Institute did a
similar study, involving thirty-eight hundred visits to apartments and
houses all over the country. They found that 15 percent of black
renters were told that an apartment
 56 ® Paved With Good Intentions was not available even
though the same apartment was offered to a white. Eight percent of
black buyers were falsely told that a house was no longer for sale.
This is hardly perfection, but it means that most of the time blacks
do not face discrimination.165 Studies like these are always
designed to find discrimination by whites; no one ever seems to test
how white applicants are treated by homeowners or apartment
managers of other races. California, which is increasingly multiracial,
suggests an answer. In 1990, the Fair Housing Council of Orange
County received 1,178 complaints of housing discrimination. The
largest number of complaints were filed by whites, followed by
blacks and Hispanics.166 There are many reasons other than
discrimination that explain why blacks tend to live among other
blacks. White neighborhoods are usually more expensive, and blacks
may not be able to afford them. They may also think that white
realtors, superintendents, and neighbors would be hostile, and
sometimes they are. But it never seems to occur to the people who
study housing patterns that many blacks prefer to live with blacks.
Just as many prefer black-theme dormitories at universities, and just
as they frequently socialize with each other at work, blacks are often
more comfortable in black neighborhoods. Middle-class blacks who
do choose to live in largely white neighborhoods may even be
taunted for it by other blacks. Many affluent blacks deliberately
refrain from moving into white neighborhoods they could afford
because they want their children to have black playmates.167
Moreover, it is a peculiar kind of patronizing to assume that all blacks
want nothing more than to live next door to white people. Some
blacks not only prefer their neighborhoods black, they also want
them to stay that way. A black journalist writes about a backyard
gathering in an affluent, all-black Atlanta suburb. The party suddenly
went silent when a realtor's car, bearing a white couple, cruised
slowly down the street. "I hope they don't find anything they like,"
said one of the black guests in all seriousness; "otherwise, there
goes the neighborhood."168 The football player Jim Brown also once
said that he did not want to live among whites.169 Attitudes like this
do not figure into public discourse. If the races are found to live
apart from each other, the reason is always assumed to be white
prejudice.
 Racism 57 The charge of racism is frequently leveled
against mortgage lenders. In a 1989 study of ten million loan
applications, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution found that whites
were approved 74 percent of the time while blacks were approved
50 percent of the time. The newspaper did not consider such things
as the applicant's debt burden, credit history, value of the collateral,
or size of the down payment, so the "study" means virtually nothing.
This did not stop other newspapers from picking up the story,
putting it on the front page, and running headlines saying that black
applicants are twice as likely to be rejected as whites.170 When the
federal Office of Thrift Supervision released similar statistics several
months later, it expressly pointed out that without data on the
financial positions of applicants, it was impossible to pin the
difference on race. This did not stop members of the U.S. Senate
Banking Subcommittee from immediately asking regulators for new
ways to force banks to stop racial discrimination.171 The same
empty drama was played out two years later, when the Federal
Reserve Board released the same rough data showing the same
disparities. Jesse Jackson immediately concluded that the figures
confirmed "what we have known for decades: Banks routinely and
systematically discriminate against African-Americans ... in making
mortgage loans."172 In fact, in that year, the Fed's figures showed
that Asians were more likely than whites to be granted
mortgages.173 No one appeared to notice; certainly no one argued
that bankers are prejudiced in favor of Asians. In a few cities,
journalists thought to test the racism theory by finding out whether
blacks were more likely to have loans approved if they applied to
black-owned banks. In Houston, Texas, the city as a whole approved
black applications 50 to 60 percent of the time. The one black-
owned bank, Unity National Bank, approved them only 17 percent of
the time.174 The curious thing about this whole controversy is that
there is not even a theoretical reason why bankers should refuse to
make profitable loans to black people. No one ever complains that
white auto dealers or shoe salesmen refuse to do business with
blacks. Are bankers somehow different from everyone else? Our
elected representatives are prepared to believe that bankers
systematically forgo profits in order to indulge prejudice. Like most
Americans,
 58 Paved With Good Intentions they have never bothered
to find out that black bankers are no more inclined to make risky
loans than whites are.175 Like Unity National Bank in Houston, they
may be less likely to make loans to blacks, since they know they will
not be accused of racism for turning down a risky credit. The same
blinkered thinking is behind the charge, repeated endlessly, that
white cab drivers refuse to pick up black riders. Does anyone really
think that a large number of white drivers will pass up what they
think will be a peaceable, paying customer just because he happens
to be black? One white New York City driver, who has heard the
story about racist taxi drivers too many times, points out that in his
city as many as seventeen drivers have been murdered by riders in a
single year, that hundreds are beaten and wounded, and thousands
are robbed or defrauded. Eighty-five percent of the six felonies
committed against cabbies every day are by black men between
ages sixteen and forty. As he explains, "Cab drivers have only one
effective way of protecting themselves against the murderous
thieves who prey on us. And that is to exercise experienced
discretion in whom we pick up. . . . Half of New York's cab drivers
are themselves black and act no differently from white drivers."176
Indeed, in a study conducted by Howard University in Washington,
D.C., when similarly dressed blacks and whites tried to hail taxis, the
blacks were seven times more likely to be refused a ride. But in the
lawsuits against taxi companies that arose from these studies, not
one of the "prejudiced" drivers was white; all were either African
immigrants, native-born blacks, or Middle Easterners.177 No driver,
of any race, is likely to want to carry young black male passengers
into parts of town that are known to be dangerous. In only the first
two months of 1991, Washington, D.C., cab drivers were robbed
more often than in all of 1988 (the police did not have statistics for
1989 or 1990). A reporter interviewed more than a dozen city
cabbies — all black — and found a near-uniform policy of not picking
up young black men at night. The drivers knew they risked a $500
fine for discrimination, but as one explained, "I'd rather be fined
than have my wife a widow." The head of the D.C. T&xicab
Commission said that robberies
 Racism 59 and violence against drivers were a pity but that
she would enforce the law. "Discrimination in this city, and that is
what that is, blatant discrimination, will not be tolerated," explained
Carrolena Key.178 The very notion of racial discrimination takes on a
strange new flavor when blacks who refuse to pick up other blacks
because they fear for their lives are accused of it. The medical
profession is also said to be prejudiced against blacks. Recently, for
example, it was reported that white dialysis patients are more likely
to get kidney transplants than blacks. This was attributed to racism,
and some newspapers even wrote despairing editorials about it.179
But what are the facts? First of all, organ transplants work best
between people of the same race; one fifth of blacks have antigens
that make them reject kidneys donated by whites. At the same time,
blacks are only half as likely as whites to donate organs after they
die, so the supply of black kidneys is small. This mismatch is even
worse because blacks have kidney failure more often than whites
and are several times more likely to be on dialysis. Even more
important, whites who are still alive are six times more likely than
blacks to donate a kidney voluntarily to a close relative — and a
close relative's kidney is usually the best match. Finally, although the
operation is usually free, postoperative treatment has generally cost
$5,000 to $10,000 a year, a cost that wealthier whites may be better
able than blacks to bear.180 Dr. Clive O. Callender is head of the
Transplant Center of Howard University and is the nation's senior
black transplant surgeon. He explains that one of the most common
reasons why blacks refuse to donate organs is that they are afraid
the recipient might be white. Whites do not seem to worry whether
a black might get their organs; Dr. Callender points out that even at
Howard, 80 percent of the organ donors are white.181 Where is the
"racism" here? In fact, the disproportion between the number of
black and white kidney recipients — the problem that prompted
charges of racism in the first place — is not very great to begin with.
Though blacks suffer 28 percent of serious kidney diseases, they get
21 percent of the transplants.182 If anything, one might conclude
from the facts that the medical establishment is doing a remarkable
job of finding kidneys for black
 60 ® Paved With Good Intentions patients despite built-in
obstacles erected by blacks. Nevertheless, it is whites who are
accused of racism. A more fruitful approach has been pursued by the
federal government. It recognizes that the problem is not white
racism but an inadequate supply of black kidneys. In the San
Francisco area, it has made a grant to the African-American Donor
Task Force, which works through black churches to persuade blacks
to donate organs.183 Sometimes the "racism" explanation for
black/white differences is almost comical. Money magazine recently
pointed out that even when blacks and whites have similar incomes,
whites are two and a half times more likely than blacks to own
financial assets such as stocks, mutual funds, or an Individual
Retirement Account. The magazine quoted an insurance salesman
who explained this by saying that stockbrokers do not like to go into
black neighborhoods to make house calls.184 Stockbrokers do not
make house calls in any neighborhoods. Jesse Jackson was being
just as ridiculous when he wrote in 1990 that the process of voter
registration — perhaps a five-minute procedure that helps stop voter
fraud — is a deliberate obstacle thrown up by whites to keep blacks
from voting.185 One writer explains that the reason people complain
about welfare but do not object to widows receiving their dead
husbands' Social Security benefits is that welfare mothers are likely
to be black while most Social Security widows are white.186 This
fanciful view ignores the fact that most people see Social Security
income as the just return on payments made during a lifetime of
work, whereas they see welfare income as unearned and therefore
less deserved. "Environmental racism" is the name of a recently
discovered form of discrimination. This is said to be the deliberate
siting of potentially polluting factories or waste dumps in nonwhite
neighborhoods. A National People of Color Leadership Summit on
the Environment was held in Washington, D.C., in late 1991 to
debate what to do about the problem.187 By 1992 there were at
least ten minority-based environmental groups charging officials with
such things as "radioactive colonialism" and "garbage imperialism."
It would be no surprise if activists could show that nonwhites are
more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards than are