While reflecting on the current protests, I imagined a conversation in which someone observed that the proposition "All lives matter" is now construed as an apologetic for racism. And if asked how it could be so construed, a progressive might respond, without any awareness of the irony, "You've got to be carefully taught."
Most but not all readers will know that that is the title of a song from the Broadway musical South Pacific. The song is a declaration of the idea that nobody is born racist, that bigotry can only be learned by indoctrination. While I quite applaud the show’s overall message of equality, I realized some years ago that I disagreed with this song’s particular claim. Not that I think anybody is born racist as such, but that we are predisposed to a tribal mentality of which racism is only an extreme case. We don’t learn it automatically, but we do learn it easily, because it feeds certain prejudices that most of us actually are born with.
I knew I wasn’t the only one to think so, but I hadn’t noticed the song discussed anywhere else in those terms, so I did a bit of Web searching. South Pacific debuted in 1949, and Wikipedia mentioned that “’You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’ was subject to widespread criticism,” but not, apparently, for its specific thesis about the origin of racism. Of course, any condemnation of racism was going to draw some flak in those days in certain parts of the nation. However, since racists think white supremacy is just a fact of nature, it doesn’t matter much to them whether you say we’re born knowing it or have to learn it while growing up. They apparently did have some objection to the idea that white supremacy would never occur to anyone unless they were indoctrinated, but this was not exactly a killer argument against it. After all, those of us who know anything about calculus had to be carefully taught every bit of it, but that doesn’t mean anyone could be justified in doubting the truth of calculus.
The problem, really, was with the suggestion that racism, even if true, was not any more obviously true than calculus. Like other political and social orthodoxies, racism is thought by many of its advocates to be obviously true to anyone with an open mind—so obviously true that no instruction is even needed. You have to be taught, not to believe it but to disbelieve it. In the context of any such orthodoxy, the encouragement of skepticism is therefore not a good thing. Orthodoxies don’t like hearing “That’s not true.” They don’t like it any better when anyone says, “We should consider the possibility that it’s not true.”
Hammerstein was also a bit disingenuous. Yes, liberals did believe that racism had to be carefully taught. But they also believed that equality had to be carefully taught. The blank slate ruled the intellectual waves in those days. In the conventional view, people were not naturally either tolerant or intolerant, because they were not naturally anything. They were whatever their environment—their cultural upbringing—made them. The moral mandate, then, was not only to preach equality, but to create an environment in which equality would seem too obvious to question.
And insofar as equality was just a repudiation of racism, they succeeded. Nobody with a significant audience is advocating white supremacy any more.To some of us old folks, that looks like progress. But, as Steven Pinker has claimed, intellectuals hate progress, and so they have to deny it when it happens. Sometimes that means creatively redefining some key terms, such as racism. We're told that maybe it used to mean white supremacy, but it doesn't mean that any more. Or at least, not only that. Sure, a white supremacist is a racist, but only one kind of racist. Nowadays, on this worldview, it's trivially easy to be a racist and not even know it. How do you come to know it? By being woke, which in 2010 is shorthand for being carefully taught.
Next: Hating progress
(This page last updated on June 11, 2020.)