Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (2 page)

Such language is incendiary and fuels a widespread denigration of Americans — including Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Mediterranean Europeans, East Indians, Armenians — who are multi-ethnic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and under pressure from civil rights groups like the NAACP) are designated "white." Unlike anti-black attitudes, which are universally decried and would trigger the expulsion of their purveyors from any liberal institution in America, this racism is not only permitted but encouraged, especially in the academic culture responsible for the moral and intellectual education of tomorrow's elites.

An anthology of the first five years of
Race Traitor
, for example, has been published by a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house (Routledge) and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by a prestigious Harvard professor, Cornel West, who writes: "
Race Traitor
is the most visionary, courageous journal in America." West's coziness with the racist Louis Farrakhan (he was a speaker at the Million Man March) has done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popularity with students, or his standing in the "civil rights" community. Afrocentrist racists like Leonard Jeffries, the late John Henrik Clarke, Derrick Bell, and Tony Martin-to name just a few — have also been integral parts of the academic culture for decades, often running entire academic departments. By contrast, a distinguished Harvard scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, who is white, was driven out of his classroom by black student leftists who decided that his lectures on slavery were politically incorrect because they did not reflect prevailing leftist views.

In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the "progressive" intelligentsia. Examples range from communist Professor Angela Davis, whose ideological rants are routinely laced with racial animosity (and who recently told an audience of undergraduates at Michigan State that the number one problem in the world was white people), to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose boundless suspicions of white America amount to a demonization almost as intense as Elijah Muhammad's. In her introduction to an anthology about the O. J. Simpson case, Birth of A Nation 'Hood, for example, Morrison compared the symbolic meanings of the O. J. Simpson case to D.W. Griffith's epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, in order to imply that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing Simpson for the murder of Ron Goldman and Simpson's ex-wife.

With university support,
Race Traitor
intellectuals in the field of Whiteness Studies have produced an entire library of "scholarship" whose sole purpose is to incite hatred against white America, against "Euro-American" culture, and against American institutions in general. According to the editors of
Race Traitor
, "just as the capitahst system is not a capitalist plot, race is not the work of racists. On the contrary, it is reproduced by the principal institutions of society, among which are the schools (which define 'excellence'), the labor market (which defines 'employment'), the law (which defines 'crime'), the welfare system (which defines 'poverty'), and the family (which defines 'kinship')."
^‡
The editors of
Race Traitor
characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an umnitigated.catastrophe for "peoples of color" and an offense to everything that is decent and humane. In the perspective of these race radicals, white America is the "Great Satan." In academic cant, they replicate the poisonous message of the black racists of the Nation of Islam.

Some of the manifestations of this anti-white racism are explored in this volume, the purpose of which is to open a frank discussion of a subject that is almost never directly discussed. Almost all the chapters first appeared as columns in the Internet magazine
Salon
, a left-of-center publication with sufficient editorial independence to include a dissident writer like myself. This, in itself, may be a hopeful sign of what may be possible if a dialogue is encouraged. The tolerance of
Salon
's editors for the views in this book should not be surprising, since they are the same views once advanced by the civil rights movement King led. Unfortunately, if experience is any judge, that will not make their author immune from charges of racism.

As those familiar with my autobiography,
Radical Son
, know, I once occupied the other side of the political divide. My views on race, however, have remained entirely consistent with my previous commitments and beliefs. I opposed racial preferences in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. Then, I believed that only government neutrality towards racial groups was compatible with the survival of a multi-ethnic society that is also democratic. I still believe that today.

What has changed is my appreciation for America's constitutional framework and the commitment of the American people to those ideals. America's unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England are the nations that led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion — or that we are a nation besieged by peoples "of color" trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.

The establishment of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant. White European-American culture is a culture in which the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride, precisely because its principles — revolutionary in their conception and unique in their provenance — provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white and non-Christian (and which are not so tolerant in their lands of origin). That is why America's democratic and pluralistic frame- work remains an inspiring beacon to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana, who have not yet won their freedom, but who aspire to do so. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have been able to resist the discredited and oppressive worldview of the "progressive" left.

The left's war against "whiteness" and against America's democratic culture is integrally connected to the Cold War that America fought against the marxist empire after World War r. It is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are merely updated versions of the ideas and agendas of the marxist left that once supported the communist empire. The same radicals who caused the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct administrators and faculty of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts, and even leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America's national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political, and economic institutions that form its social foundation.

The left's response to the observations contained in this volume is not difficult to predict. Impugning the motives of opponents remains the left's most durable weapon, and there is no reason to suppose that it will be mothballed soon. In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of "class bias" was used by communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with whom they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into "enemies of the people," a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror through the Stalinist purges and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left's self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on intimidation and smear to enforce its increasingly incoherent point of view.

It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so well. In the battle over California's Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) to outlaw racial preferences, for example, the left's opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy, whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, though he himself is black, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. (The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, even paying his expenses for the trip.)

During the campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated the Initiative with its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which Mrican-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights should the dreaded legislation pass. To make their case, the anti-CCRI groups sponsored television spots that actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses. A fearful voice-over by actress Candace Bergen explicitly linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that, if CCRI's proponents succeeded, women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts.

In the years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative, not a single one of the left's dire predictions has been realized. Women have not lost their rights and segregation has not returned. Even the enrollment of blacks in California's system of higher education has not significantly dropped,
^**
although demagogues of the left — including the president of the United Stateshave used a shortfall in admissions
at the very highest levels
of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to lead the public to believe that an
overall
decline has taken place. One year after the Initiative passed, enrollment had significantly fallen only at six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consists of more than seventy-four programs. Yet there has been no apology (or acknowledgment of these facts) from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other leftist groups responsible for the anti-Civil Rights Initiative campaign and for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.

When an earlier version of a chapter in this book, "Why Democrats Need Blacks," was published in
Salon
magazine, the editors printed several long responses from black readers, including the award-winning Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed. Reed suggested that I did not really care what happens to blacks and that I am insensitive to injustice when it is inflicted on blacks-a not-so-subtle imputation of racism. In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in the article itself. The critics' response was to dismiss these conservatives as "inauthentically black," "Sambos," "Neo-Cons," and "black comedians." From the point of view of leftists, the only good black is one who parrots their party line.

There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, in closing this introduction, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed in the pages of
Salon
:

I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for everyone in this country, including my extended black family. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals are what matters and race is not a factor at all.

^*
Jim Sleeper,
Liberal Racism
(New York: Penguin, 1997); see also Shelby Steele,
A Dream Deferred
(New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

^†
See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, "Abolish the White Race By Any Means Necessary," in
Race Traitor
(New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-114.

^‡
Ibid., 80.

^**
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, April 5, 1999, reported that enrollment of blacks on all the University of California campuses was only twenty-seven fewer students than in 1997.

W
HEN BILL AND CAMILLE COSBY'S SON, Ennis, was brutally murdered in 1997 during a robbery in Beverly Hills, the entire nation grieved with them. But a year later Camille Cosby unburdened herself in print with a diatribe against white Americans in a
USA Today
column entitled "America Taught My Son's Killer To Hate Blacks." The feelings expressed in this column could not be regarded simply as grief over her terrible loss. For such pain a mother could be forgiven almost any emotional excess. Written a year after the fact, however, the sentiments expressed in her
USA Today
column reflected long-held, carefully scrutinized, patiently-edited sentiments of hostility and rage against her native country and its white citizenry that could not be so easily excused. It was a form of race hatred that has become all too common among educated and successful African Americans.

Unlike the mothers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, who were destined to be disappointed by racially motivated "jury nullification," Camille Cosby saw swift justice rendered by the American system to the murderer of her son. The mainly white jury was not swayed to acquit the killer of Ennis Cosby be17 cause of his skin color, nor was there a racial constituency outside the courtroom hoping that he would "beat the system" and go free. Instead, the white prosecutor, judge and jurors worked to bring in a verdict of guilty with all deliberate speed. This was better justice than most Americans receive, white or black. Nonetheless, Camille Cosby was not satisfied; she believed that true justice had not been served. In her eyes, the killer himself was a victim-of America itself.