Mugged (2 page)

LBJ has been heaped with praise merely for having proposed an affirmative action plan for the building trades. But he backed down from pursuing the plan as soon as the first objection was raised. As with Truman’s unenforced executive order desegregating the military, it took a Republican president to actually get it done.

The century-long struggle for civil rights was over. Attorney Thurgood Marshall had won his cases before the Supreme Court. President Eisenhower made clear he was willing to deploy the U.S. military to enforce those victories. President Nixon had desegregated the schools and building trades. Racist lunatic—and Democrat—Eugene “Bull” Connor was voted out of office by the good people of Birmingham, Alabama. The world had changed so much that even a majority of Democrats were at last supporting civil rights. After nearly a century of Republicans fighting for civil rights against Democratic segregationists, it was over.

That was the precise moment when liberals decided it was time to come out strongly against race discrimination.

For the next two decades liberals engaged in a ritualistic reenactment of the struggle for civil rights—long after it had any relevance to what was happening in the world. Their obsession with race was weirdly disconnected from actual causes and plausible remedies. They simply insisted on staging virtual Halloween dress-up parties, in which some people were designated “racists,” others “victims of racist violence” and themselves, “saviors of black America.”

The fact that New York City was the crucible of so much racial agitation in the seventies and eighties shows how phony it was. There was never any public segregation in New York. No one was moved to the back of the bus. There were no “whites only” water fountains. There were no segregated lunch counters. (Blacks could even get a sixteen-ounce soda in New York City back then!) But liberals love to drape themselves in decades-old glories they had nothing to do with.

Defending himself on
Hannity & Colmes
in 2004 after sneering about the competence of Condoleezza Rice, the first black female secretary of state in U.S. history, Democratic operative and fatuous blowhard Bob Beckel boasted: “I spent a lot of time out in the vineyards on the civil rights movement.” Proving it, he said, “I’ve got scars on the back of my neck.”
⁸

Beckel was between twelve and fifteen years old during the big civil rights struggles—such as the 1961 Freedom Rides and the murders of three CORE workers by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. He was still in high school when Martin Luther King was transitioning from civil rights to the “poor people’s campaign” and white liberals were moving on to antiwar protests. Next, Beckel will be claiming to have been a member of 1927 Yankees.

Once-respected Mount Holyoke history professor Joseph Ellis also bragged about his work in the civil rights movement. He told one reporter that he had been followed and harassed by racist southern cops while on
the Freedom Trail in Mississippi. In June 2001, the
Boston Globe
looked into the facts and discovered that this, along with many of Ellis’s other fantasies, was a complete fabrication. He had never been a civil rights worker.
⁹

For Carl Bernstein, the
Washington Post
reporter whose famous Watergate reportage with Bob Woodward became a book and movie,
All the President’s Men
, the moment of civil rights heroism came when he was on a B’nai B’rith youth trip through the South when the train broke down in Greensboro, North Carolina. Carl alleges that he led the other teenagers in a sit-in at the train station cafeteria, refusing to leave the black restaurant and nearly getting arrested. For this act of brave defiance, Bernstein claims in his book,
Loyalties
, he was later reprimanded by B’nai B’rith leaders.

Reporter and author Adrian Havill searched for any evidence of the alleged sit-in for his book,
Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
. He interviewed dozens of people who ought to have known about it—other students on the trip, locals involved in trying to desegregate the station, B’nai B’rith leaders. Not one recalled such an incident. One friend on the trip said, “It is apocryphal at best.” No Greensboro newspapers mentioned it, and several Jewish leaders denied it ever happened.
¹⁰

As long as they are in no real danger, liberals love to hallucinate racist violence, with themselves playing the heroes defending poor blacks in imaginary physical confrontations—or at least blistering editorials. Every liberal over a certain age claims to have marched in Selma and accompanied the Freedom Riders.

A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past.
Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out
. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra–Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers.

While liberals spent the decades after the civil rights era pretending they were fighting 1962 battles—when most of them were five years old—the rest of us had to live through race riots, denunciations of the police, extreme restrictions on speech, liberal racial pandering and a stream of racial Armageddons.

For decades, one racist incident after another filled the news pages: a racist police siege of Louis Farrakhan’s mosque; trigger-happy cops shooting
peaceful blacks, like Jose (Kiko) Garcia and Edmund Perry; Nazis on the Wappinger Falls police force; black children held down while having their faces forcibly painted white; the racist prosecution of Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry; police brutality against an innocent black motorist in Los Angeles; and on and on. Loads of these hate crimes turned out to be hoaxes, but they would be followed by retaliatory crimes against whites, which were not.

From race riots to race hoaxes to the automatic excuse machine for black criminals, the country had gone mad.

Contrary to what you might imagine, all this did little to improve the situation of blacks. In fact, it was exactly the opposite of what was needed.

After slavery, most of black America was starting at the bottom rung of social advancement. Not only that, but they had spent centuries in the backwoods culture of Southern hillbillies. Thomas Sowell points out that much of what is thought to be black culture is actually Southern “cracker” culture, imported, like Russell Brand, from the Northern provinces of the British Isles.
¹¹

In his book,
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
, Sowell traces behavioral patterns of various early Americans back to their original regions in the British Isles. Most colonialists in Massachusetts, for example, came from a small area in East Anglia. They were educated, religious and genteel.

White Southerners were another story. Much of the Southern population was made up of eighteenth-century immigrants from the “Celtic fringe”—Scotland, Ireland and Wales. As Sowell demonstrates with a mountain of hilarious examples, the unique cultural attributes of these British highlanders included wanton and brutal violence, hair-trigger tempers, an obsession with pride, shocking promiscuity, unalterable sloth, illiteracy and a total lack of respect for human life, including their own.

Today the only place we see this culture is on the TV show
Cops
—and in the black underclass.

The people of the Celtic fringe were practically a different species from those who settled New England. In the seventeenth century, rape was a capital offense in New England, while in some parts of the South it was treated as a misdemeanor on the order of petty theft.
¹²
Around the time of the Civil War, illiteracy was virtually nonexistent in New England, but more than 20 percent of Southern whites still couldn’t read.
¹³
In military IQ tests administered during World War I, black recruits from northern states like Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania scored higher than white southerners from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.
¹⁴

The very word “cracker” is thought by some scholars to refer to the prideful boasting of the transplanted British highlanders. Remnants of their fighting spirit has proved a boon to the U.S. military, but a few centuries ago, their skirmishing included fights that involved biting off noses, gouging out eyes, and ripping the ears off their opponents’ heads. Far from objecting, local crowds would enthusiastically cheer the combatants on.
¹⁵
A millennium ago, even Roman armies couldn’t subdue the barbarians of Scotland and instead built a gigantic wall, penning them in the north.

David Hackett Fischer gives an example of the “exceptionally violent” backcountry ways from 1787 newspaper accounts in his book,
Albion’s Seed
: “robbers seized a man named Davis and tortured him at his own hearth with red-hot irons until he told them where his money was hidden. Then they burned his farm for their amusement and ‘left the poor man tied to behold all in flames.’” The raiding parties “mutilated their victims for sport.” These were families—and women were often the most violent.
¹⁶

A British soldier, Major George Hanger, said of the backcountry Scots-Irish, “I have known one of these fellows [to] travel two hundred miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person.”
¹⁷

It was these colorful folkways of the Celtic fringe that southern blacks were marinated in for centuries, but today are written about by twenty-first-century sociologists as a specifically “black culture.”

These traits have nothing to do with Africa or the legacy of slavery. The quaint customs of southern rednecks came directly from their Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestors and were passed on to southern blacks.

The East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, with its “diss tracks” and shootings and murders, are not a distant echo from the plains of Africa, but a modern version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, with much greater use of the F-word. For decades, raging right up to the twentieth century, these two Scottish families warred across the Kentucky and West Virginia border, leaving at least a dozen dead.

The Southern style of religious worship also lives on in black churches, as well as some white Protestant evangelical churches. It can be seen in the style, if not the substance, of Louis Farrakhan and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Citing Frederick Law Olmstead’s direct observation of Southern religious services in the late nineteenth century, Sowell describes the technique thus: The preacher “nearly all the time cried aloud at the utmost stretch of his voice,” “had the habit of frequently repeating a phrase,” and exhibited “a dramatic talent that included leaning far over the desk, with
his arms stretched forward, gesticulating violently, yelling at the highest key, and catching his breath with an effort.”
¹⁸

Voting Democrat is another bad habit blacks picked up from their neighbors. Southern blacks voted against their fellow Southerners only immediately after the Civil War and during the Democrats’ Jim Crow period. But then things settled down and blacks began supporting the same southern Democratic demagogues as white southerners did. The smarmy disingenuousness of a Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or John Edwards seems familiar and homey to southern whites and blacks alike.

It is a telling fact that although most blacks detested Ronald Reagan—a 90 percent black jury even found his attempted assassin, John Hinckley, not guilty
¹⁹
—a majority of black Alabamians came to support segregationist rabble-rouser Democrat George Wallace in his later years.

Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door rather than allow the University of Alabama to be integrated; he appealed to white supremacists for political advantage; and he ran for president expressly as a segregationist. As late as 1970, Wallace had used a campaign flyer in his run for governor that proclaimed: “Wake Up, Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama,” accompanied by a picture of a blonde white girl on a park bench surrounded by seven leering black men.
²⁰

But just about a decade later, Wallace went to black voters and apologized, admitting he was a Christian sinner—and they forgave him. Wallace won 90 percent of the black vote in his last run for governor in 1982.
²¹

Wallace spoke the language of the South; Reagan didn’t.

Reagan was a straightforward Californian without an ounce of southern populism. He wasn’t a demonstrative speaker, he didn’t openly discuss his Christianity and there was nary an opportunity for audience participation during his speeches.

Even what is risibly called Ebonics—black dialect—can be traced back to the British highlanders, who used such words and phrases as “I be,” “You be,” “ax” (ask), “acrost” (across), “do” (door), “dat” (that). As Sowell says, “No such words came from Africa.”

Luckily for southern rednecks, their wild and wooly ways weren’t tolerated in the North. They were barely tolerated in the South, where these poor whites were used as a buffer against the Indians, but not much more could be done about them, inasmuch as the rednecks far outnumbered the gentry.

Long before there was discrimination against blacks, there was discrimination against white southerners. When large numbers of these
country people moved north during World War II, they were aggressively excluded from neighborhoods, jobs and homes—not because of their skin color, but their accents.
²²

It was grossly unfair: Not all southerners were slothful, promiscuous drunks. But northerners couldn’t be expected to examine each case individually to ascertain whether an applicant was Robert Penn Warren or Bull Connor, Flannery O’Connor or Casey Anthony. It was more efficient simply to discriminate against all southerners.