West 'Brackets' Morality

I suppose there are those out there who found Professor Cornel West's apology for his participation in the Million Man March somewhat short of convincing. To me, reading the op-ed piece in the New York Times was out-right painful. Here was a stunning exemplar of that genre of moral acrobatics that I shall call the "bracket."

The bracket is a simple thing, really. It happens when a person arrives at a conclusion in matters moral that does not suit his own purposes. In response to his prejudices or wants, he begins to bracket, or forget issues he once deemed of paramount ethical concern. That is not all. The bracket is not complete until the person announces that his actions are motivated only by the highest of principles.

Although the Million Man March ostensibly addressed a crucial American issue--the dissolution of the the Black family--it was clear from the outset that the rally would be as much an opportunity for Louis Farrakhan to assert his will to power as it would be a forum for collective atonement.

All of which put Professor West--and other Black men--in the difficult position of having to choose between forgetting about the march and forgetting about the man who put it all together.

Professor West chose the latter, with reasoning as follows: It is true that Minister Farrakhan hates white people and gay people and Asian people and Jewish people and Arab people. It is true Minister Farrakhan insisted that all Black women stay home. It is true--Professor West could not have known this at the time, but my hunch is he would agree after having attended the march--that Minister Farrakhan's two-and-a-half hour rant all but ignored the purpose of the march, with its extended numerological speculations about the height of the Lincoln Memorial and the number of chapters in the Qur'an. But....

Here comes the bracket. But the issue at hand loomed larger than Minister Farrakhan. But Dr. King himself entered into dialogue with the radical Black separatists of his day. But--and here I am reading between the lines--Professor West needed to assert that despite his Harvard chair, he is a common man, a common Black man, just one in a million.

So Professor West bracketed some inconvenient moral concerns that threatened to keep him out of the march. He chose to ignore the evil--not to mention lunacy--that was being espoused from the dais which he graced with his presence. Professor West seemed to be saying not simply that race matters--race is the only thing that matters.

Professor West was in good company. The Left media--both on this campus and throughout the nation--were strangely silent about Minister Farrakhan's homophobia and his vicious racism. Only his decision to exclude women from the march elicited any indignance whatsoever. Bracketing is what happens when a great big sacred cow--in this case, race--comes up against a mere sacred calf--lets say, sexuality. The Left gets so completely caught up in the worship of the former that they forget about the latter.

To be sure, the kind of moral contortionism on display in West's piece is hardly the exclusive province of the Left. In a recent article in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz argued that Pat Robertson's vocal support for the State of Israel more than compensates for the overt anti-semitism that is to be found in Robertson's books.

Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish neoconservative, claimed that Robertson's references to Jewish conspiracies were misguided and factually incorrect, but ultimately innocuous. This from a man who is not shy to expose Jew-hatred on just about any other occasion.

Podhoretz and West would do well to take a lesson from Minister Farrakhan himself. In a Newsweek interview that appeared this week. Farrakhan said that Jewish groups had faxed him after the march, asking him to abandon his anti-Semitism. "What they're asking for, it seems to me, is to cut the heart out of a messenger's message," the Minister said. Farrakhan, alas, does not bracket.

Samuel J. Rascoffs column appears on alternate Fridays.