Stephen Carter’s first book shook up notions of race. His section does the same for religion.
Yale law professor Stephen Carter is obsessed with boxes. Or, more precisely, Carter is obsessed with the labels we place on boxes to save us the trouble of finding out what is inside them, labels that keep us from the arduous and often unpleasant task of thinking, labels that tell us who we are and what we must believe.
It is a warm, early summer day in New Haven, and Carter and I are taking a stroll through one of his favorite sections of Yale’s campus—the cemetery, a place, it must be said, filled with boxes. Through an ornate iron gate, a vast expanse of rolling hills punctuated by gleaming tombstones and the occasional bundle of flowers provides a serene vista that seems a million miles from the strange synthesis of urban detritus and collegiate civility only a block away.
Noting the graves of such illustrious figures as Noah Webster and Eli Whitney, Carter segues easily through a dizzying number of subjects, peppering his conversation with legal citations, historical references and statistical evidence; there are few topics he isn’t interested in. At six feet three inches, Carter, thirty-nine, is an imposing figure who, despite his casual dress—a red-and-white-striped tennis shirt, blue shorts and white sneakers—has a slightly pedantic manner, frequently announcing that his next thought will have four points and then ticking them off one by one. He speaks in a quick, fluid staccato, as if he is worried there isn’t enough time to finish his thought. Although formal, Carter radiates an easy warmth, as when he describes the special pleasure he derives from watching black law students succeed. What comes across with equal force, however, is his unsentimental devotion to hard truths. Pausing before the grave of one of Yale’s presidents, he pointedly tells me that despite the cemetery’s peaceful beauty, joggers are occasionally mugged here, a comment I take as a warning about the danger of drawing easy conclusions.
“To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box … and on that box is a label, not of my own choosing,” began Carter’s first book, the 1991 Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, a controversial critique of the belief that in order for an African-American to be “authentically black,” he must hold a particular set of opinions, foremost among them an unswerving support for affirmative action. Such conformism, Carter argued, is unacceptable to an intellectual whose duty is to accept no proposition as being beyond analysis.
Although Carter was careful to state that his doubts about affirmative action did not amount to outright opposition to it, he nonetheless incurred the wrath of many liberals who read Reflections as another volume in the growing anti-affirmative-action literature. The book voiced a number of criticisms of affirmative action: it most often helps those who need it least; its rhetoric may imply that blacks should receive preference because of their “special perspective”; and, most damning, its proponents too often expend more energy scrutinizing traditional standards than encouraging excellence. “My goal in life,” countered Carter, “has been to beat them—the white folks—at their own games.”
The book made Carter famous and provoked bitter responses from those who didn’t buy his protests that he was an independent, not a conservative, thinker. “Although he thinks of himself as a free-floating intellectual with no ideological allegiances,” says Martin Kilson, a professor of government at Harvard and a longtime defender of affirmative action, “Carter’s basic mind-set on everything from race to the judiciary is a conservative one, which inevitably favors the status quo.” That the book’s publication coincided with Clarence Thomas’s nomination further caused many to assume that Carter, too, was an enemy.
Two years later, undaunted, Carter continues to wage his iconoclastic war with the publication of The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (Basic Books). If Reflections was a declaration of independence for black intellectuals, then The Culture of Disbelief is an equally impassioned demand that religious Americans like himself be allowed to express themselves as individuals in the face of the secular prejudice that all religious people think the same way. Together, the books are an eloquent plea for people to be judged according to their accomplishments and potential, rather than by their religion or the color of their skin.
As we wend our way toward the far end of the cemetery, Carter, an Episcopalian, laments the anti-religious bias of liberal politics. “lf you are going to hate Pat Robertson’s views, hate them because of the goals he is advocating, don’t dismiss them just because his vision of God leads him to advocate them,” Carter tells me. Religious convictions should receive the same hearing secular beliefs get. The labels nonbelievers often slap on those with faith—RELIGIOUS FANATIC: WON’T LISTEN TO REASON—do a terrible injustice to a huge number of Americans, limiting their rights as citizens by requiring that they, in effect, check their religious convictions at the door. “The truth is that tens of millions of people rely on their religion for the moral knowledge that tells them how to conduct their lives, including their political lives.” Carter pauses. “And they don’t like being told to shut up.”
The most provocative argument in The Culture Of Disbelief is that the conventional wisdom which holds that the separation of church and state was designed to protect politics from religion is mistaken; in fact, the reverse is true. State tyranny, rather than the undue influence of religion, is the real peril today, says Carter. Indeed, it was this danger that the founding fathers had in mind when they erected a barrier between the secular and the sacred. Carter doesn’t want to demolish the wall, he just thinks there should be a few doors in it. “Religions are independent centers of power that claim the allegiance of their members. Those claims will sometimes trump the claims for obedience that the state makes,” he says. For Carter, religion is a moral critic that checks state power; active religions, in the end, are essential to a healthy community.
The publication of The Culture Of Disbelief further secures Carter’s place as one of America’s preeminent thinkers. Indeed, Carter is a leading figure in the emerging constellation of black intellectuals (Cornel West, Patricia Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Morrison and Shelby Steele are a few of the others) who are fast becoming household names because of their defining contributions to the debate about race, class and gender in the post-Cold War era.
With race edging out communism as America’s national obsession, this intelligentsia are finding their talents in especially great demand. Whether opining in The New York Times, The New Republic or The New Yorker or appearing on This Week With David Brinkley and the Today show, Stephen Carter is sought after because of his willingness to probe subjects that touch a nerve. Even though many place Carter squarely in the conservative camp, his worldview is genuinely complex: he is prochoice, considers paying taxes “a privilege, not a burden,” is against prayer in schools and believes that Anita Hill told the truth.
Conservative organizations that assiduously courted Carter after Reflections was published suddenly stopped calling when he defended Hill on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Liberals who shunned him for his stand on affirmative action reclaimed him when he supported civil-rights advocate Lani Guinier. “Guinier was branded a dangerous radical because she believes that most white people are hostile to black people. Well, surveys show that most white people are hostile to blacks,” Carter says, reciting a string of supporting statistics from memory. “I guess that makes me a dangerous radical, too.”
Unable to agree on much else, the left and the right are starting to acknowledge that the myth of undifferentiated black unity is just that. As Toni Morrison recently wrote, “Black people think differently from one another … the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed.” Or, as Carter puts it, African-American solidarity must be built “not on our willingness to profess a particular viewpoint, but on our shared love of our people.” One claims one’s racial identity, he writes: “The claim is not of a politics or a culture or an aesthetic, or not purely of any of these. The claim, rather, is love.”
In spite of the extraordinary attention he received for his first book, on the hot topic of race, Carter decided to write his second on the much less fashionable subject of religion. In addition to these books, he has published a virtual torrent of articles on everything from constitutional law to genetic engineering, all of which played a large role in making him, at age thirty, the first black tenured professor in Yale Law School’s history. He is now finishing a book about the appointment and confirmation processes for judges and other federal officials; is pondering a fourth book, about how we justify death and killing; and is editing Thurgood Marshall’s oral history.
Carter worships at the altar of the meritocratic ideal; he believes that the only society worth striving for is one in which the best argument wins, no matter whether you are black or white, devout or secular. While his ideas are much discussed both inside the academy and out, he does not think of himself as an activist; he engages the world through the written word. The very idea of a magazine profile strikes Carter as faintly absurd, he tells me as we drive through New Haven in what he calls “the oldest working Volvo in existence.” So I am only a little surprised that when I ask him to tell me the story of his life, he simply looks off into the middle distance and recites his resume. “Stanford ’76, Yale Law School ’79, two federal clerkships … ” And that, in a sense, is exactly Carter’s point: it shouldn’t matter what his childhood was like or where he buys his suits; he wants to be judged according to the label he has put on his box. I have a grudging respect for Carter’s reticence, but as a journalist I want confessions, revelations …. Then I recall an essay in which he has a revenge fantasy inspired by the shabby treatment blacks customarily receive at upscale clothing stores: “Ah, I sometimes think, to be able to hit them over the head with my resume,” and I realize he has revealed something.
Born in Washington, D.C., on October 26, 1954, on the heels of the landmark decision that would end legally segregated education, Carter was raised in a solidly middle-class family. His father worked at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in which he eventually became an assistant secretary. Later, he was a pro~r in the business school at Cornell and the first president of the University of the District of Columbia. After public high school in Ithaca, New York, Carter completed a degree in history at Stanford, , where he wrote a column for the school’s newspaper. He tirelessly took contrarian positions, and drew heat for a column entitled “The White Movement’s Burden,” in which he criticμed white students for co-opting the political movements started by people of color.
Carter was accepted by both Yale and Harvard law schools, although he was admitted to the latter only after they discovered he was black. Once at Yale, Carter quickly fell in love with the law; he even spent New Year’s Eve of his first year studying in the library. “One critic accused me of having a twelve-year-old nerd’s view of intellectual activity, which is true.” At Yale he met his wife, Enola G. Aird, who, after working in corporate law, became a children’s advocate. She is currently writing a feminist theory of motherhood. They have two children whom, according to one friend, Carter is known to entertain by performing three-minute versions of The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars in which he acts out all the roles.
After clerking for two judges, one of them Thurgood Marshall (whom Carter calls his “second father”), Carter practiced corporate law for less than a year and then returned to Yale as a professor.
If Yale’s ivy-covered, neo-Gothic campus is a cloister, its law school is a cloister within a cloister—cold and somber, with long, dark hallways and stone walls that encircle a pleasant, grassy courtyard. Better known for producing statesmen and scholars than bloodthirsty litigators, the law school is something of an intellectual hothouse. As Carter leads me into his ramshackle office, he sheepishly admits that unlike most people with perpetually messy offices he doesn’t know where everything is.
His rigorous thinking is at times maddeningly precise: “I sometimes sacrifice clarity for the sake of ac.curacy.” In fact, one often gets the sense that Carter loves rigor for its own sake. Like other intellectuals whose obsessions with rational solutions sometimes lead them to sidestep unpleasant realities, Carter can be too clever by half. He devoted much of his first book to defending black conservatives, but coyly claims to be ideologically neutral; he advocates a judicial confirmation process that is more concerned with a candidate’s competence than with her ideology, a position that blithely ignores the fact that the judiciary has been so thoroughly politicized in recent years; he says he is not against affirmative action, but is vague on what policies he is for.
As we chat in his office, Carter gets noticeably animated when recalling the excitement he felt as a student at Yale; he likens the thrill of discovering law to mastering a language. The attraction of law for Carter is obvious. Law’s power derives from its very formality and abstraction, its preference for the somber over the sensational. That said, I am surprised when Carter tells me a story, complete with dramatic flourish, hyperbolically titled, “The Most Dangerous Children in America.”
A few years ago in Queens, New York, Carter and his daughter, then five, were dropping off relatives after a vacation. Suddenly, a gunfight broke out between two teenaged drug gangs. With bullets whizzing, Carter threw himself to the ground while his daughter huddled with the family in a nearby building. After the battle ended, she emerged shaken but unscathed.
In the second half of Carter’s story, he was on a Connecticut commuter train and overheard two wealthy teenaged girls arguing over which was the more exclusive community— Westport or Fairfield. They traded the names of celebrities who lived in each town and, finally, one girl came up with what she thought was the topper— “Diana Ross lives in Westport!” she announced. But the second girl replied, “She doesn’t live there, she was only visiting, and I know because I met her at my father’s store.” Putting her hand on her hip, the first girl sneered and said, “Your father has a store? What does he sell there … hardware?” The second girl was crushed.
“So who do you think are the most dangerous children in America?” Carter asks me in a tone that reminds me of a scene from The Paper Chase. I pause at the question and think about the labels I put on boxes, but in the end I have to admit that although I get the point, I fear those gun-toting kids a lot more than I abhor the girls’ elitist attitudes.
“That’s what people usually say, and most days,” Carter confesses with a sigh, “I have to agree.” Together, the two stories reveal a larger conflicting truth about our society for him. The shocking violence of the first story nearly overwhelms the more abstract implications of the second. But are these two threats different in kind or only in degree? That is the sort of question Carter believes we should be asking.
“Those kids with the guns are probably either dead or in jail by now,” Carter says grimly, looking away. He pauses a few beats to let it sink in. “But those little girls are now young ladies and may one day be our leaders. They will be in a position to do more damage in their long lives than the drug dealers can do in their short ones. There are too many people in public life with the arrogance that comes from simply being well-off, who believe poverty is always the fault of the poor, and that nobody is ever really discriminated against … ., he trails off. “Those attitudes do tremendous damage and will continue to, far, far into the future.”