When former Representative Mel Reynolds of Illinois was hauled off to the pokey last month for engaging in sexual relations with an underage girl, he nevertheless managed to strike a heroic pose. “When they shackle me,” he said, “like they shackled my slave ancestors, and take me off to jail, nobody in this room will see me crawl.” It was race hypocrisy on a scale almost to match that of Johnnie Cochran, who was widely supposed to have got O. J. Simpson acquitted of murder by comparing Detective Mark Fuhrman of the Los Angeles Police Department to the late dictator and mass-murderer Adolf Hitler.
Why did the respective courtrooms not burst into laughter at such extravagant comparisons? Our racial problem is not a lack of toleration but an excess of it —toleration, that is, of stupidity and mendacity and the most outrageous and self-serving nonsense when they come clothed in the garments of racial self-righteousness. And, of course, such toleration breeds still more outrageous and self-serving nonsense. It begins to look as if it is simply impossible to be honest about race in America. The controversy last year over The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, made this pretty clear, but the events of the past month have confirmed it.
What National Review said about the American justice system in the wake of the Simpson trial—that “trials have become brownie-point contests between rival gangs of lawyers, conducted according to hermetic standards of
