NAPPY EXPERTS  

Race Experts: How the New Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn 

 Review by Mark Webster 

           How far have racial relations worsened in the last few years?  Take three examples.  First, recently four white Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers dressed in black-face and an African-American member wore  Ku Klux Klan outfit to a non-fraternity, off-campus  Halloween party.  As fraternity pranks go, this seemed mild. However it set aflame racial relations at the University.  The fraternity’s apology and the University’s suspension of the fraternity through May 15 were not enough for some at the University.  A University panel required fraternity members to attend two hour long sessions on the role of the KKK and black-face in American history and to sponsor a university wide education session on social interaction in an integrated society.

          Second, NBA Rocket coach Dan Issel called a fan a “fucking Mexican piece of shit.”  Issel later issued an apology, which an Hispanic group refused to accept.  Issel has agreed he has a problem with anger.  Kentucky Farm Bureau has suspended running ads featuring Issel hawking their product. He eventually quit in disgrace.

 

Issel may lose his coaching job. 

          Third, an illiterate, brain damaged, ex-boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay told an anti Semitic joke about Jews and canoes at a promotional event for a new movie about his life, but everyone acted as if nothing were said.  What’s going on? 

          Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s new book Race Experts provides some answers.  The sub-title set forth above states the thesis in a few words.  In just over two hundred pages, Quinn shows how talk about race has become a shouting match fueled by what appear to be the best of intentions.  The civil rights movement began as a legal rights movement that sought universal equal justice for all and the removal of double standards.  But the movement metamorphosed into a therapeutic movement that justifies unequal treatment for some individuals and a new double standard. 

          If you’ve ever heard an argument in favor of injustice because it somehow would improve someone’s self-esteem or if you’ve ever attempted to excuse a person’s inexcusable voluntary action and place blame for the misbehavior on that person’s culture, environment, or victim status, then you’re familiar with therapeutic language. 

          The legal movement for civil rights improved the status of some races but never created a new code of etiquette for all races to use.  Into that vacuum raced the race experts armed with the language of therapy.  Lasch-Quinn’s  first chapter discusses the new racial etiquette.  This consists of little more than black assertiveness and white submission. To use Tom Wolfe’s apt phrase, this pratice permits blacks to “mau-mau” whites, particularly liberal whites, who get to savor the masochistic pleasures of belittlement in order to improve black self-esteem.  The gap between mutual respect and co-operation, however, widens.   

          Lasch-Quinn’s second chapter demonstrates how the civil rights movement eroded into a search for self-identity, self-expression, and therapy.  The third chapter discusses the use of the encounter group to help individuals obtain psychological freedom and liberation from “hang-ups” in order to enjoy social change through the politics of therapy.  The fourth chapter demonstrates how experts used Racial Identity Therapy  to teach blacks to realize they have been conditioned to feel inferior and how to search for black        identity by turning away from whiteness and inward to blackness.   Only then could blacks reach a newfound identity that would lead to active community involvement in the development of black power. 

          Incredibly the fifth chapter covers how New Age Therapy resulted in the lucrative world of diversity workshops. 

          The last two chapters are the most interesting in the book. Chapter six is titled: ”A World of Endless Slights: Diversity training and Its Illogical Consequences.”   Diversity hustlers claim to be able to teach businesses how to manage politically correct racial etiquette, for a price.  Lasch-Quinn describes how one training video shows “a world in which unbridled racism, sexism, and other interpersonal hatreds are a given…an arena of perceived slights, suspected bias, and egos as fragile as blown glass.”  This is the world the TKE fraternity brothers unknowingly entered. 

          Chapter seven, titled “ In Perpetual Recovery: the Problem with the Multicultural Education for Self Esteem,” demonstrates the effect of the therapeutic culture on education and children’s book publishing.    A sub-chapter entitled “the FlapOver ‘Nappy Hair’” sums up best the thesis of the book.   

          Ruth Sherman, a white graduate student teaching in a predominantly black neighborhood, had earned a full-time job by doubling the number of her third grade students who met state standards for reading.  In an effort to encourage reading, she suggested her students read Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair.

In this book a young black girl’s curly hair becomes a reason to celebrate blackness.  The students loved the book’s highly effective style and drawings.   

          The parents, however, did not.  Sherman was called from class and forced to confront irate black parents who called her racial epithets, shouted threats, and lunged at her. She had to be escorted from the school and the neighborhood.  After the parents and the school realized the book was meant to celebrate black pride, the school and some parents invited her back.  She refused to return. 

          Lasch-Quinn analyzes this incident in some detail.  The school failed to protect the teacher.  The parents, though black, exhibited racism and demonstrated problems of their own.  Their racism, like the racial statement of Muhammad Ali about Jews, was explained away or deliberately ignored.   

          But Lasch-Quinn argues the incident disproves the theories of race experts who insist lack of self-esteem is the main problem facing blacks today.  One parent, Cathy Wright , asked Sherman, “Who  said my child had problems with her hair?”  Indeed, who did?  The race experts. 

          I interpret this to mean the children did not suffer low self-esteem.  They liked their hair and enjoyed reading about a little girl who also liked her hair.  The inexperienced white teacher had been taught, however, that blacks need a boost in self-esteem, and she believed the book could deliver it.  The parents, again who were bigots in their own way, interpreted the phrase "nappy” as an insult from a white person. The book gave them the opportunity to race bait and insult the young teacher.  On top of that, the author of the book is a black woman who used the book to insult the “wimp” hair of non-blacks.  In other words, the author attempted to build the self-esteem of one group at the expense of another group.  The young teacher either missed this or willfully ignored it.    

          What’s the result?  An excellent teacher can no longer teach in a school where she thrived.  The students were robbed of an opportunity to learn from an excellent teacher.  The author sold more books.  Racial differences were magnified.  Double standards were permitted.  This needless mess was spawned by race experts  promoting an unsubstantiated New Age theory of self-esteem 

          Lasch-Quinn closes by warning us we are playing with fire.  Our present confusion could result in a resurgence of racism.  The civil rights revolutionaries did not need experts to tell them how to live with  their neighbors.  We don’t either.