THE BIGOT'S HANDBOOK

By Jack E. White

BACK IN THE 1970S, RICHARD PRYOR HAD A routine about a group of Asian boat people being introduced to American life. Lesson No. 1: How to pronounce what is now commonly known as the N word.

Last week a real-life version of Pryor's comedy sketch was played out among a rarefied band of right-wing intellectuals. At its center: Dinesh D'Souza, a 34-year-old Indian-born conservative wunderkind who has made a name for himself by bashing women, gays and minorities ever since he presided over the Dartmouth Review, a fecklessly racist student publication, in the early '80s. Today he is a case study in assimilation through bigotry, an ambitious immigrant who has achieved minor celebrity in his new homeland--and a sort of honorary status as a white man--by taking advantage of opportunities created by the civil rights movement, then turning his guns on it. Nothing could be more American.

D'Souza's latest manifesto, The End of Racism, is one of the creepiest books to appear in recent years. Even more than D'Souza's previous book, Illiberal Education, which savaged the campus vogue of multiculturalism, it contains so much sophistry, half-baked erudition and small-minded zealotry that even right-wingers who share many of D'Souza's ideas are outraged by its, well, political incorrectness.

Last week Robert Woodson and Glenn C. Loury, two of the country's most prominent black conservatives, "disaffiliated" themselves from the American Enterprise Institute, where D'Souza is a research fellow, in protest over the book. Sounding more like the Rev. Al Sharpton than a conservative Republican, Woodson denounced D'Souza as "the Mark Fuhrman of public policy" and called on conservatives, black and white, to "publicly disavow the racist ideology" his book espouses. "This is a moment of truth for the conservative movement as to where they stand on the issue of race," says Woodson. "The only time you hear from white conservatives is when there is a white fireman aggrieved over affirmative action. If they want to have any influence in this area, they have got to speak out when blacks and Hispanics are aggrieved. This is one such occasion." So far, says Woodson, not a single white conservative has responded.

What's taking so long? Like Camille Paglia in the feminist literary sphere, D'Souza will say whatever it takes to attract attention, no matter how tasteless, irresponsible or distorted. He contends that white racism is no longer much of a problem in the U.S. Instead, all our racial troubles can be traced to the fact that "black culture" is so dysfunctional it amounts to a "civilizational" gap between African Americans and the rest of society. He does not bother to differentiate between the crime-ridden urban underclass and the middle-class high achievers such as Woodson, head of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, and Loury, a professor at Boston University.

D'Souza also argues that because racism had its origins among intellectually gifted Europeans during the Enlightenment, it can't be all bad; that American slavery was not a racist institution; and that segregation was merely a well-meaning attempt by paternalistic whites to help blacks "perform to the capacity of their arrested development." He urges the repeal of every major civil rights law in the land, including those that allow blacks to sit at lunch counters and use the same water fountains as everyone else. Thenceforward the government would be required to function in a race-blind manner, but private citizens and institutions, from taxicab companies to huge corporations, would be free to discriminate.

Why would any respectable publisher choose to purvey this bunk? The answer, I'm afraid, is that bigotry sells books. New York City's Free Press has published a long list of first-rate works on political and social issues by writers from every point on the spectrum, yet so far the only blockbuster among them (with 400,000 copies in print) has been Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which argues that blacks are genetically stupider than whites. On the jacket of D'Souza's latest, the Free Press high-mindedly says its publication will further expand "the range of acceptable discourse about race" by "setting forth the principles that should guide us in creating a multiracial society." But judging by the initial 100,000 press run, the largest by far in the company's history, the Free Press also sees D'Souza as a moneymaker and is willing to profiteer on the obscene ideas he has packaged in the plain brown wrapper of specious scholarship.

The U.S. certainly does need a searching debate on racially tinged issues from affirmative action to welfare dependency and crime. It is quite clear, for example, that racism alone cannot account for the sorry plight of the underclass and that traditional civil rights remedies can do nothing to solve it. But such a dialogue stands little chance of being productive if it is polluted by the nonsense D'Souza is peddling. Those who want to deal honestly with race can begin by boycotting his book--not because it's politically incorrect, but because it is just plain wrong.