Time spent idling in the shower is time not spent watching 106 & Park, but it can be almost as educational. Immersed in the activity the other day, I discovered the answer to a social mystery that will surely baffle some future civilization as it looks back on our era and scratches its collective noggin.
Racism, sexism, homophobia. In the last fifty years, these ills have been significantly reduced or sterilized. Social inclusion of black people as civil equals, women as intellectual equals, and gays as moral equals has doubtlessly resulted from the civil rights, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements that sought such acceptance. For this achievement, if not for their dreary politics, the activist leaders of those movements deserve all the credit they get. The question is: how did they do it?
How were negative group stereotypes undone by despicable activists who embodied those very stereotypes? It’s a mystery that ought to interest anyone who cares about social harmony.
Since Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, the three most visible black “leaders” have been Huey Newton, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Newton was a violent street hustler. Jackson is an adulterer, extortionist, and race-baiter. Sharpton is a victim-mongering loudmouth who’s been convicted of defamation.
Leaders of Women’s Liberation disproved the stereotype of women as overemotional and mentally weak by demanding government entitlements and making a fine art of going berserk. Betty Friedan, during a debate with Phyllis Schlafly, told her: “I’d like to burn you at the stake.”
Gloria Steinem, the most prominent feminist of modern times, is known for saying, “A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.” If that’s not exactly a model of cool intellectualism, then certainly the following statement by her makes an uninspired slogan for girl power: “The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.” Steinem, what’s more, was a hypocrite. She notoriously forbid male students from some of her campus lectures and many of her early career advancements were directly correlated to whom she was sleeping with at the time. Am I implying causation? Of course not—she never had any kids.
As dissident feminist Camille Paglia described her, “Steinem always exploited her sexuality to attract men…She has used men as a social escort service her entire life…There isn’t a rich-bitch table that woman has not sat at.”
Even more paradoxical is the gay movement, which tried to demonstrate the normalcy of homosexuals by organizing public parades that featured dildo floats and hot-air penis balloons. Many gay leaders even treated STDs as proud political achievements. Edmund White, author of “The Joy of Gay Sex,” said “Gay men should wear STDs like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.”
So how did this loopy lot—and their countless imitators—manage to be in large part responsible for the social integration we now enjoy?
My shower-evoked theory is that the bad examples set by these activists were crucial to their success. By publicly personifying the negative stereotypes of their groups, they made everyone realize just how those stereotypes did not apply to ordinary members of those groups. These unattractive activists were wingmen for society’s cock-blocking bigotries.
Reading five pages of Gloria Steinem is enough to make the average woman seem like a genius. Steinem has published thousands of pages. Women now outnumber men in management.
All it takes is a couple of Jesse Jackson soundbites to make any racist shiver in shame for having had demeaning notions about the decent minorities he knows and works with.
To be sure, Dr. King was a civil rights leader who did have a directly unifying influence. He was courageous and charismatic, but he can’t be credited with all that’s transpired since his early death. Nor was he without his own disappointing flaws. “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” he once observed in 1964. I can’t believe someone so dignified could say something like that. In fact, he probably didn’t say it. Maybe it was originally said by Jack Boozer, the man Dr. King heavily plagiarized in his doctoral thesis. (No, he was not without his own disappointing flaws.)
My theory is supported by the fact that acceptance of homosexuality has come slower than the decline of racism and sexism. Anti-homosexuality is largely a theoretical prejudice, since sexual orientation is not readily apparent. It’s taken people longer to notice the contrast between low-life freaks and normal gays. Recent rises in approval of gay marriage show that this is now happening.
As historical proof of my theory, consider there were admirable “leaders” long predating these modern movements. Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass were great, inspiring men whose achievements were all the more remarkable for taking place so soon in American history. Douglass, the abolitionist activist, advocated equal rights along with individual responsibility. “If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs,” he said in his most famous speech, “then let him fall!”
But these shining exemplars were stubbornly viewed as exceptions to the rule. What white society needed was proof that the stereotypical rule itself is an exception. They didn’t need great black (or women or gay) leaders. They needed lousy ones who could mirror their foul fantasies and make them realize how much those fantasies differed from reality.
Nothing acquits a false demon like the exposure of a real demon. History’s thank-you note will credit Jackson, Sharpton, Steinem and company for their services in this regard.
Here’s the bad news. Ethnic rivalries are on the violent rise in parts of certain cities concentrated with recent immigrants. These immigrants, unlike prior generations, are living entirely within their own communities. They mainly experience other ethnicities through media. Concerning this new phenomenon, the posthumous performances and racialized rhetoric of our uninviting “leaders” will no longer be so benign.