The Klanny Man Kan

Drudge Report today has a link to an intersting case of the spider being caught in its own web. Apparently BBC is airing an anti-black drama, causing one civil rights leader to advocate refusing to pay the television license as a protest. The complaint is that the drama, which details the life of an idealistic young black man who quits his banking job to become an inner-city school teacher only to fall victim to false accusations of assault from the very students he is trying to help, accuses blacks of having a "blame culture." With one voiceover having the main character saying things like "Everything bad that has ever happened to me is because of black people," it's easy to see why this one raises eyebrows. (And indeed, the linked article reports that the original play on which it was based was called 'Fuck Black People!" Auntie tactfully renamed it "Shoot the Messenger.")

The first real review I found on it suggests, not surprisingly, that charges of racism are greatly exaggerated. It's primarily a character drama with heavy themes of forgiveness and living for the future. The reviewer suspects that the piece deliberately courts controversy (to an extent that he's interested to hear what non-whites thought of it), but is otherwise benign. No way to know for myself, of course, until I've seen it.

So what of the drama and what of the protest? Well, I'm in kind of a bind here. On the one hand, although I can't speak for Britain, I definitely think influential sections of the black population in America suffer from a "blame culture." I posted some evidence of this a few days ago. I don't think it would hurt to have some dramas like this on American TV, where white people aren't automatically the bad guys, no matter how statistically absurd.

On the other hand, I feel obligated to oppose government-monopoly broacast television. No one should have to pay for entertainment they find offensive. The BBC model is outdated at best, oppressive at worst. Time to privatize it. In a purely free-market system, people wouldn't have to risk arrest to withhold funds from services they no longer want.

On the other other hand, would this program even get aired in America? I can't honestly imagine a TV drama with the line "Everything bad that has ever happened to me is because of black people" here. In the US, this kind of protest (and there would be one) would have teeth. Jesse Jackson would hold a couple of rallies, and enough people would attend that the local cable companies would start to get nervous about what would happen if all or even most of them decided to cancel their subscriptions. Advertisers would shy away from the negative publicity, etc. Ironically, it's because the BBC isn't a free-market service that it has the freedom to get away with this.

So is this an argument that Capitalism kills public discourse? Of course not. People - bottom line - shouldn't be forced to pay for entertainment they find offensive, whether or not they're right to be offended. Nor should a government monopoly get such far-reaching powers to control the content of entertainment. Nor, for that matter, is entertainment the whole of the realm of public discourse. That said, there is an important lesson here: that action by a focused minority is often more effective than having a simple majority.

Let's do a thought experiment and imagine the main character here were white. Would anyone honestly make the news calling for a boycott campaign over a line like "Everything bad that has ever happened to me is because of white people?" I personally find it hard to believe. Moreover, it wouldn't really matter what the race of the character who spoke the line was. White people are fair game no matter who's doing the talking.

It isn't that no one would be offended. It's just that there is no organized white movement that monitors what's said about white people on television. Partly that's because there's no history of systematic oppression of white people on which to ground such a movement, granted. But partly also it's because white people do not have a "blame culture." Such a line spoken about a white person would be taken by many for what it was: a frustrated character in a drama summing his experiences - no need to generalize, no racism implied.

There was some discussion on Samizdata today about whether it's even worth voting Tory anymore that got me thinking in a similar vein. The complaint is that the Conservatives never say anything anymore that distinguishes them from New Labour. David Cameron's position, as far as it can be determined from what he says, is more or less Blair's. One commenter suggested that once in office Cameron might "head right," and so it was still worth a vote (Labour, after all, is the devil you know), if only as a gamble. Of course, lots of people jumped on him and wanted to know what guarantee there was that Cameron wouldn't "head left." And in principle, none, I suppose; we can't by definition predict what's behind a lie. All the same, it occurred to me that there is some reason to think that a "conservative" politician is more likely to "head right" after an election won on appeal to the center than he is to "head left," and that's because of the presence of the party.

After the election, general public opinion ceases to be such a concern. What starts to matter more are special interest groups and the daily dance of political maneuvering with one's opponents on the other side of the floor. I would guess that special interest groups are the stronger of these concerns. And what is a party, really, but an umbrella organization under which various special interests gather? If for no other reason than we bother to divide into broad political camps and give them labels, it seems more likely that "right wing" special intersts would be knocking at the "conservative" candidate's door than that left-wing groups would be doing the same. Everyone who's up on their modern British history knows, after all, that Thatcher never really had a mandate in her day. What happened, really, is that Labour went off into loony-left la-la-land for a decade or so, spawning an ineffective third-party protest that split its vote. (See here for a good book on the details.)

Lots of people complain about special interst groups and parties as entities that divide the public from their representatives, obscuring the public "will." And while there's certainly some truth to that, from a certain point of view, I'm not entirely inclined to agree, for several reasons.

First among them: it's not clear what the public "will" is without experts to present arguments (and advertisements) to shape it. Most of the public has neither the time nor the inclination to study current events and policy, so they take their cues from experts who do.

Second among them: it isn't possible to have a conversation among millions. Even in an ideally-informed public, like-minded people would still need to cluster into groups and appoint spokesmen. In other words, they would need special interest groups and parties to represent them.

Third among them: special interest groups add a dimension to politics that isn't captured by a simple vote - that of emotional investment in an issue. Not all people care about all issues equally. Special interest groups are a way for people to prioritize those that matter to them more.

Most importantly, though, special interest groups and parties are ultimately only stable so long as the ideas underneath them are stable. They provide a kind of interface through which the debate can be kept substantive. If nothing else, an interest group presents a coherent position. Once the ideas become incoherent or contradictory, the basis for the group is undermined, and it ceases to be something meaningful, ceases to be something that people feel like they have an interest in joining (or opposing) and becomes just a kind of sports team name.

The process may happen more slowly than we like, but believe it or not, interest groups do ensure, in their way, that politics is about issues and ideologies. It may not seem so to those of us independently interested in politics, but by grouping public opinion off in this way, that's the larger role they play.

Incoherent ideas don't stand to scruitiny, and the groups that represent them don't last much longer than the exposure. That's why the race-baiting crowd has found it necessary to invent all kinds of fuzzy terms like "diversity" behind which to hide their real agenda. It's also why they do what they can to avoid discussing them directly, prefering to talk about feelings and to build taboos. The moment there's any real discussion of "diversity" as a "value," the house of cards will come down, and they know it.

Philosophy, as it turns out, matters. Though it may not seem so in the short term, in which discourse fluctuates from good to bad and back, in the long term, only coherent, rational ideas survive. I do not believe the public can be hoodwinked forever.

So I emerge from this of a single mind after all. We want free-market television, not the kind of prescribed beliefs the BBC peddles. And we want interest groups like this race-baiting front free to preach what they like, to stage whatever boycotts they like. We want these groups because they are a thing that can be argued against.

It's true that in the short term such groups can be the basis for public deception. It isn't the case, after all, that all the problems of the black community are white people's fault. This is a lie they've been told by their leaders and have come to believe - possibly having more faith in it now than they did in time past when it was arguably true. They've been duped, and the result is the afformentioned "blame culture." But the truth will come out in the end.

Is there need for "white interest groups" to counter the effects of black boycotts of TV? It wouldn't hurt, I suppose, but I think there is a more effective weapon. A special interest group is a thing that can be argued against and a thing that crumbles when exposed. So - expose it.

The racial double standards we all suffer under today aren't going to go away as long as white people stay silent about them. But there isn't a need for any advocacy group. All there is need for is everyday people telling the truth. When someone implies in your presece that white people are oppressors, take offense. The implication is, after all, offensive: you're being unfairly accused of racist crimes you didn't commit. If the subject of whether blacks have a "blame culture" comes up - respond simply that they do. You are being asked for your impression, so give it. Likewise, if anyone asks if there are racist white people, say that there are. This doesn't commit you to any co-responsibility for their opinions. Only a racist would think it did.

I suspect there won't be much hype over this program on BBC in the end, and I think that's because the gas is aready going out of the "oppressed blacks" front. Political correctness is evolving, and it's finding new victims in the process. 30 years of affirmative action doesn't seem to have satisfied anyone (despite real progress in black employment and education), and the public is finally getting bored. All it will have been is an attempt to court controversy, a gamble that will most likely have paid off. BBC's relative freedom from viewer opinion will have made it more efficient than capitalist television in this one instance in terms of getting a reaction from viewers, but that hardly makes up for 50 years of boring documentaries. For my part, I'm reminded again of the virtues of getting the "best of" on PBS and saving myself the yearly fee.