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David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Stanley Crouch, a contributing editor of the "New Republic," author of The All-American Skin Game, Or the Decoy of Race.
DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: In your new book, you make an unbridled assault on what you call the politics of blame, which you also call the Afro-centric hustle. Could you tell us what you mean by this?
STANLEY CROUCH, Author: Well, what I'm saying is that I think this is not a, a, this is not a serious discipline first. It's a fraudulent discipline, and it exists because--
DAVID GERGEN: The Afro-centric discipline.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right. It's a fraudulent discipline that is based on some, some idea that you can make people feel better about themselves if you give them a glorious history. And so it doesn't matter with these people whether the scholarship is on or off because they're functioning in a university system that has for the last 25 years subsidized miseducation of purportedly alienated groups, whether those groups are racial groups or sexual groups, et cetera. So that, you know, you can get a job essentially teaching kids that they're alienated from everybody else in the United States.
DAVID GERGEN: It's not that the education is not--sort of the history many not necessarily be wrong, but encourage them to think of themselves as African-Americans, as opposed to just Americans.
STANLEY CROUCH: As African-Americans, as Indians, you know, women who've been--who are the mules of men and so on and so on.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STANLEY CROUCH: None of which is to say that when--the United States is not always attempting to purify its democratic proposition.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STANLEY CROUCH: But, but it's not in the interest of the society or the particular group for people to be fed distortions, exaggerations, Marxist-derived simplifications, tribal visions, those kinds of things. Those things get in the way.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah. But they would argue, look, we did have some of our history which we should not be denied, we--don't deny us our pride, after all, we were trampled down by slavery and then by prejudice after the Civil War. There have been honest reasons why we need to reassert ourselves and so if we want to take on this vision of ourselves, they would argue, haven't you sold out, in effect?
STANLEY CROUCH: Well, my argument is this. How many people know where in Europe Thomas Edison's family comes from? And there's a reason why. If you come up with the electric light, that's enough.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. I understand.
STANLEY CROUCH: And so I don't really think--I mean, you know, the Wright Brothers are probably, their German name was probably Reich. But most people don't know about that. Most people don't even know they were bicycle mechanics, because Kitty Hawk looms so powerfully over the 20th century. And with all of the extraordinary accomplishments that Afro-Americans have made in this society, having fought in the French and Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, helped to win the West, fought in the Civil War, were decisive factors in the union forces of the Civil War, were in the cavalry, and on and on and on, helped to start programs that foresaw what we got from the International Red Cross, et cetera, built, you know, colleges and all of this stuff, invented musics, dances, affected the national humor and all of that. With all of that, to have to worry about identifying in some abstract way with a foreign continent to me is kind of silly.
DAVID GERGEN: But it's also--it's not just that. It is the politics of blame. It is to say we are the victims. We have been victimized and, therefore, whatever happens in our society, we don't have to work hard because we can say, essentially lay it off on victimology.
STANLEY CROUCH: Well, I would say that the people who promote that in a number of these university positions, that's what they're thinking about.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STANLEY CROUCH: But I would suggest that many of the black Americans who have been successful, baron leaders, realtors, newspaper men, beginners of magazines, founders of institutions, et cetera, they wouldn't at all deny that there were difficulties.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STANLEY CROUCH: But they also would not deny the success that they had against that--
DAVID GERGEN: You hold out Florida A&M--Mrs. Mobley, the dean there--
STANLEY CROUCH: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: --as an example of the way a school that is a predominantly black school, business school, which has been extraordinarily successful, the way it should approach the questions of advancing people who are black.
STANLEY CROUCH: Yeah. Well, what she did was she found out what the business world wanted.
DAVID GERGEN: Yeah.
STANLEY CROUCH: And she said, what do you want out of business majors, and she spent twelve/fifteen years really developing it. For one thing, she discovered that it was good to have business ladies who actually could write readable English sentences. So that put them ahead of most of the white business ladies who graduated. Right. They actually can write English that other people can read. And so she, she systematically worked at coming up to that standard, and now Procter & Gamble and a number of people see Florida A&M and that business school as in the top four or five in the United States, because she build it like that. And she didn't--she--as Albert Murray has pointed out often, that if people would just approach these kids the same way athletes are approached by coaches, when coaches get athletes, they try to make them into champions. That's their fundamental ambition. And I think that--and intention--and I think that's what Mobley did.
DAVID GERGEN: Let me come back to the kind of models and people who you would hold out as models for young blacks that they should look to, people who have risen above the question of race and come--as seen as individuals, who become individuals who have gained greatness, and tell me what you--what it is about them that you think we should hope--that we should look to. Frederick Douglass.
STANLEY CROUCH: Well, I think Frederick Douglass--well, you know, Frederick Douglass is one of Nelson Mandela's models, and I mean, he had, he had a human vision that transcended race. I think that that's the greatness of a writer like Ralph Ellison, that he saw as Constance Roarke points out in her work that Americans are part, you know, part Negro, part Indian, part frontiersmen, that we're all, that there's this mix that we--that makes us American. Albert Murray calls it a mulatto culture. Everybody in the world, right, no matter what we say about each other, everybody knows an American when they meet 'em. You know, if I change my name to Kwame something, and then put on Kinte cloth and this and that and jump on a plane and go to Ghana, within five minutes the Ghanians are going to go ah, an American. If the most Negro-hating, redneck guy in Boston decides that he's got to go to Dublin to get away from these darkies, right--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STANLEY CROUCH: --as soon as he gets off the plane, the Irish people are going to say, ah, an American. If you put Gotti and Rudolph Guiliani on a plane across each other, where they can sneer at each other all the way to Sicily, as soon as the two of them got off in Sicily, the Sicilians would say, two Americans. Now, the point I'm making is, is that there's something in all of us as Americans, for all of our variations, that everybody recognizes, and what I'm most interested in in my work in The All-American Skin Game is to try to focus as much as possible on the human connections that we have and the extraordinary achievements that we have made against what I call the decoy of race.
DAVID GERGEN: Now you talked about Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison, Charlie Parker, you're a jazz critic, and you also talk about Charlie Parker a lot in your book, and you've written about him.
STANLEY CROUCH: Yeah. Well, Charlie Parker, I'm working on a biography of him right now. He had a lot of problems, but he, he became an extraordinary virtuoso of the alto saxophone. In an interview a guy was saying, he said, well, Charlie, you have such extraordinary technique, and Parker said, well, you know, I don't really think it's all that extraordinary because I used to practice twelve to fifteen hours every day. In fact, they told my mother I'd have to move if I didn't stop playing. It wasn't done with mirrors, not this time.
DAVID GERGEN: You come down talking about race and Martin Luther King said, don't judge people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. You had an interesting--you said it all boils down to an old Southern adage.
STANLEY CROUCH: Oh, the one about don't worry about the, the color of the--don't worry about the color of the cow but whether or not the milk is sour.
DAVID GERGEN: Sweet or sour.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: That's the essence of it for you.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right. That's it.
DAVID GERGEN: But you remain, after all is said and done, you have a phrase that appears continually through this book, a tragic optimist.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right. Well, you see, I think that's the central vision in the Constitution, and in our sense of government, for instance, that we recognize, like doctors must, that you are constantly going to have to deal with what I consider the four fundamental things that dog all societies, i.e., folly, corruption, mediocrity, and incompetence. And it doesn't matter what society you're in. And those are the things--those things form the tragic fate of humanity. But we have had so many victories on so many different levels in terms of our emotion towards purifying our democracy, towards realizing in our society the grandest ideas of the alignment, expanding them, in fact, in such a remarkable way that every society in the world that comes to freedom ends up imitating the United States. And, you know, it ends up imitating America's documents, because those are the richest vision, those documents form the richest vision of how human beings can compromise and argue and battle their way towards fairness.
DAVID GERGEN: So your argument is get beyond the skin game.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: Give that up.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: It's fraudulent.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right.
DAVID GERGEN: And move on to this higher aspiration.
STANLEY CROUCH: Right. Address your humanity. That's always there, whether you like it or not.
DAVID GERGEN: Thank you.
STANLEY CROUCH: Thank you.
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