THE BIGOT'S HANDBOOK

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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.