A Few Short Thoughts on White Privilege

I just talked to a couple of Whites about White privilege. One is middle aged and the other is elderly. Their IQ’s range from 140-150. One got partway through Law School, the other is a freshman at the university. Both are extremely well-educated (self-educated) compared to the average White. One is liberal, the other is Leftist, a Communist.

Neither one had ever heard of White Privilege Theory. I had to explain it to them, from its origins on. They sat there shaking their heads and saying how dumb and absurd the theory was. They also said it would not resonate at all with average Whites, and all it will do is piss them off and make them want to go to a Tea Party.

For Whites like me and my friends, we think that White Privilege means something like while we have to eat a shit sandwich, Blacks have to eat a triple decker shit sandwich. So the White Privilege theory says that while we are eating this shit sandwich, we are yelling, “Damn! This sandwich tastes good! I’m sure glad I don’t have to eat that triple decker like the you know who’s.”

Within White society, Whiteness gives you no particular benefit. You’re just another person, and you get treated on your merits like everyone else.

If you are low on the totem pole, especially at work, you get treated like serious shit by other Whites. They really look down on Whites lower on the pecking order in the workplace. You’re treated like a “nigger,” mostly because you have a “nigger job.” They order you around like you’re a slave, brutalize you psychologically, then fire you for no reason. They don’t even attempt to disguise their contempt for you. You may as well be Black.

As I said, White has no advantages in White society.

It’s not like you walk into a party, and as soon as you step in the door, the White host says, “Hey! You’re White! Come on in! Free drinks all nite on the house, you get in free and free drinks to my pool bar every nite from now on, and by the way, here’s my daughter, I want you to marry her if you would like. She’s an attorney, she’s beautiful, and she’s a nympho.”

Yeah right.

White privilege is a favorite of the Black bourgeois and upper middle class Blacks. It’s a way for them to avoid talking about class. If you go Abagond‘s site, you will notice that he never discusses the “C” word – class. It’s all about race. In this way, Abagond gets to promote his class interests – those of the upper classes, while avoiding the real race problem in the US, which is one of class, not race.

I have a feeling that Abagond would go to the favelas of Brazil and harangue those poor, downtrodden Whites there about their White privilege and racism against their Black and Brown fellow slum-dwellers. I’m sure that will go over real well!

All these people talking of White privilege and other forms of Identity Politics are objectively contras – this line is counterrevolutionary and rightwing. It divides the working classes into male against female, gay against straight, one race against another, churchgoers against non-churchgoers, encouraging one of each pair, males, straights, Whites and churchgoers, to vote against their class interests and for the Right.

It also avoids discussing class, probably because of the upper class interests of the economically privileged folks who are dishing out this intellectual theory.

This is the same thing that the Right has always done – to divide working classes on race, gender, orientation and religion to keep them from uniting to vote for their class interests against the elite. This stuff is just bourgeois indulgence and ought to be irrelevant to any real liberation project.

What the Heck? Juggalo Funeral

Repost from the old site.

A real White trash funeral, complete with booze cooler casket and the bereaved dressed in their Sunday best.

There is something about this picture that really bothers me. Those people with the Insane Clown Posse t-shirts are known as juggalos. Juggalos are the fan base of the Detroit White hip hop group Insane Clown Posse.

Juggalos have lately gotten a reputation for being associated with a lot of crimes, to the extent that they are now considered to be a White street gang. But only about 1

The dead baby. Yuck. Ninja down!

There is something just so wrong about showing up at your baby’s funeral wearing Insane Clown Posse t-shirts. And the coffin looks like a beer cooler. And if you look at the really weird markings on the coffin, there are two aliens engaged in a shootout.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMv9d1pIoBA]

The story around this baby’s death is that it died preterm when the woman with the dyed hair was 6-7 months pregnant, due to her very heavy use of drugs. She was supposedly a very heavy drug user who took all sorts of drugs every day during her pregnancy, resulting in the stillbirth of the baby preterm. Afterward, she supposedly sued the hospital for killing the baby, when in fact it was her drug abuse that did it.

What’s even worse was she called in to some Juggalo radio show and talked about her dead baby for about a minute, then started bitching about some merchandise they never sent her.

Below is from her MySpace page. It’s worse. Here is a closeup of the cartoon images on the casket from the MySpace page along with some text:

The “psychopathics” from outer space are going to protect this stillborn baby from evil? WTH?

Here is the funeral announcement from the MySpace page:

Juggalo Ho posted:

R * I * P

*Anabelle Lotus Krawczyk* 05 – 11 – 2008

Mother ~ Julie aka Juggalo Julz Father ~ Joe aka Druggalo JK47

BORN ~ Mothers Day, Sun.

May 11, 2008 10:39am

DIED ~ Mothers Day, Sun.

May 11, 2008 10:52

FROM MOMMA, JUGGALO JULZ::

MY LITTLE NINJETTE DIED 1 IN A MILLION MEDICAL ERROR..FOR NO REASON. THE DOCTORS SHOOK THERE HEADS AT ME AND SAID WERE DONT KNOW WHY OR HOW. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? MY DAUGHTER SHOULD BE IN MY ARMS RIGHT NOW AND SHES GONE AND THATS PRICELESS TO ME!!! I PROMISED MY LOTUS I WOULD GET JUSTICE FOR HER DEATH TO MY VERY LAST BREATH! PLEASE HELP A JUGGALO FAMILY OUT…

EVERY & ANY JUGGALO & JUGGALETTE IS INVITED TO MY BABY NINJETTE ANABELLE LOTUS KRAWCZYK FUNERAL…WERE ALL A FUCK’N FAMILY AND OUR LITTLE LOTUS IS GONE TO SHANGRI-LA…PLEASE WRITE ME BACK HERE OR EMAIL IF U WILL COME. IM STILL MAKING ARRANGEMENTS. ON DATE OR TIME YET..

BEST WISHES ~

PLEASE WEAR ANYTHING DARK LOTUS OR IF U FONT HAVE LOTUS ANYTHING PSYCHOPATHIC GEAR TO HER FUNERAL

PLEASE JUGGALOS IF U CAN DONATE ANYTHING EVEN.

$0.01 OR $1.OO WILL HELP US TO GET A HEADSTONE FOR OUR DAUGHTER.

YOU CAN DONATE AT THE FUNERAL OR IF U CANT ATTEND PLEASE FEEL FREE TO STILL DONATE ANYTHING TO OUR HOME AND EMAIL ME ON HERE AND I WILL SEND U MY ADDRESS…

PLEASE BRING A LOTUS FLOWER THEY ARE SO RARE TO FIND. OR PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN FIND ONE.. IM HAVING A LOT TROUBLE FINDING IT…

PLEASE FAMILY COME AND SUPPORT US IN OUR DARKEST HOUR…NINJA DOWN

MCL JULIE & JOE

WHERE ~ MALEC & SONS FUNERAL HOME

ADDRESS ~ 6000 N. MILWAUKEE AVE. CHICAGO IL 60646

FUNERAL HOME PHONE ~ 773 – 774 – 4100

DATE ~ FRIDAY MAY 23 2008

TIME ~ 9:00AM – 1:00PM (Service starts at 9:00AM then we go to the cemetery)

*REMEMBER AT A FUNERAL WE ALL FOLLOW TOGETHER TO THE CEMETERY AFTER THE SERVICE…..

LAYED TO REST AT ~ EDEN CEMETERY

ADDRESS ~ 9851 W. IRVING PARK ROAD SCHILLER PARK IL 60176

CEMETERY PHONE ~ 847 – 678 – 1631

*WE PRAY TO SEE ALL JUGGALOS THERE FOR ANABELLE LOTUS….

THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT, A GRIEVING JUGGALO MOTHER & FATHER

You’ve got to be kidding? “Ninja down”? The mother’s name is “Juggalo Julz,” and the father’s name is “Druggalo JK47?” Tell me this isn’t true. Something about that is just wrong.

I realize I have been told that it’s un-Commie of me to make fun of White trash, and there’s nothing really funny about a stillborn baby, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

It’s always sad when a kid dies, but at least she didn’t get to be raised by these parents.

LOL. Not much I can say to this photo. I started busting up the first time I even looked at it, and it’s about a dead baby!

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Tim Wise, “What If the Tea Partiers Were Black?”

I have very mixed feelings about this guy, but sometimes he’s just right, or at least part-right. This is one of those times. Check it out. I don’t care if he’s a self-hating White. Big deal. What matters is the message, not the man.

Tulio wrote an “Imagine” piece in the comments a while back that was similar to this column. It was a tour de force, so great I was sure he copied it, but apparently he made it up. These thought experiments can be very useful because they illuminate personal and political issues in allegorical way that sometimes hits home in the solar plexus.

Lots of New Sick and Evil Videos Up on the Old Site

We have pretty much removed the sicko flicks from here because WordPress doesn’t want them, but we are continuing to post them over at the old site.

Traffic really plunged there. At the peak, it was up to 68,000 hits/day. Now it’s down to 3,500/day over there and 4,000/day here, for a combined total of 7,500/day for both sites. Traffic collapsed when the South Korean government banned my website! Everyone in South Korea has to go through some government server to get on the Net, so the government is able to ban sites pretty easily.

Anyway, for your twisted freaks on here:

Eating a Cooked Fish While Alive: The sickos in China think it’s cool to keep a fish alive until you cook it, then cook it in some weird way so it’s still alive, then consume the poor thing while it’s still alive! To be eaten alive! Good God, what a horrible punishment.

You know, the tribes of the SE US, from around Louisiana and the coast of Texas such as the extinct Karankawa, used to do this, . They would capture enemy warriors, tie them to a pole, then surround them with braves who would charge up to the poor sod with knives and slice off bits of his flesh, then eat them in front of him, just to freak him out even more. I assume at some point, they’ve eaten so much of the poor guy that he expires, but it’s sure a Helluva way to go. Gimme a heart attack any day. Hell, gimme cancer. Just not that.

Nick Berg Beheading Video: The original Iraqi Al Qaeda beheading video, released in 2003, with the poor, innocent but foolish Nick Berg meeting his end. The first time I watched this, I was shaking for hours afterward, and I was seriously freaked for a week or two. I watched it again and it was a little better, but not much. I’ve never watched it again – twice was enough! But it’s a classic as far as this shit goes. Includes a thorough writeup on the whole sad story behind the crime.

Man Electrocuted on Train in India: At a crowded train station in India, some idiot somehow finds himself on top of a train. He tries to get down several times, and people reach up to try to help him. Then he walks away and starts strolling down the roof of the train. Like a dumbass, at one point, he reaches up and touches a live electric wire. He is instantly electrocuted and killed. His body quickly catches fire, and he’s gone in a ball of flames in an instant. Electricity is a powerful motherfucker all right. I didn’t feel much sympathy while watching this because the guy’s such an idiot.

12 Year Old Pakistani Boy Beheads a Man: This has got to be about as evil is it gets. The Taliban bastards in North Waziristan capture a US spy, probably an ISI agent in the area, tie him up, and give the knife to a young kid so he can kill him. There are some other kids watching and holding the poor guy down, and maybe some girls watching too. It’s hard to tell. He takes forever to saw the guy’s head off, and reminds you of a butcher carving up an animal carcass. This is child abuse in its worst form. Don’t do this to kids.

Woman Electrocuted in China: Another idiot video. A middle aged woman, apparently mentally disturbed, climbs a utility pole in the middle of some seriously crowded Chinese city and won’t come down. The sheer mass of humanity below is breathtaking in itself. Rescuers are trying to get to her, but she’s just up there crying and won’t come down on the ladders.

There are power lines near her, and a few times, like a dumbass, she reaches up and grabs them, and of course gets electrocuted each time. But for some reason, possibly poor grounding, she gets off pretty easy. I’m told that she survived the ordeal with minimal injuries.

Worst Ankle Twist Ever: A soccer game is being performed, possibly somewhere in the Mediterranean or in the Southern Cone of South America – the players look like Med Whites of some sort. Anyway, soon some poor guy sustains a horrible injury to his ankle. People rush out, put him on a stretcher, and as he is being carried off, you see, incredibly, that his ankle appears to be twisted a full 90 degrees! I don’t know how that’s possible, or if there’s any way to fix it.

Arab Woman Stabs Guard at Israeli Checkpoint: A 21 year old Palestinian woman is getting ready to be searched before going through the Kalandia Checkpoint in Jerusalem. I do not understand the layout of this checkpoint, why it’s necessary, or where it goes to or from. Anyhow, the guards turn away from her, she reaches into her belt, pulls out a huge knife, rushes one of the male Israeli guards, and stabs him! Damn! He goes down, and other guards quickly pile on her and disarm her. The guard sustained minor injuries in the attack and survived.

Convicted Killer Tries to Grab Cop’s Gun in Court: A Black guy is on trial for the murder of his White wife and their son. Her family is in court. At some point, he rushes the bailiff and tries to grab his gun. Other cops, attorneys, all sorts of people, pile on the guy and handcuff him. Then they lead him out of court while the family of the dead woman he killed scream at him.

John Graziano Head Wound: Hulk Hogan’s son, age 17, borrows his Dad’s car and goes for a ride with his friend, Graziano. Possibly he’s drunk. At some point, he totals the car and nearly kills Graziano. Hogan’s son survives. The video shows this poor guy, Graziano, in the hospital afterwards. He seems to have lost a good part of the front of his forehead, that is, his brain! Somehow he’s still alive, but he’s a total vegetable. A lot of people were mad at the Hogans about this incident, and it’s apparently the source of a major lawsuit now. Really disturbing.

Photo of James Vance, Failed Shotgun Suicide: One of the really bad things about trying to kill yourself is that you might fail and actually survive afterward, but be so fucked up you wish you were dead. This is what happened to James Vance, a teenage boy from the US who was depressed and using drugs when he went to a playground and shot himself in the head. That night, he had been using drugs and listening to Judas Priest.

The case resulted in a lawsuit against the band for supposedly making this idiot try to kill himself, but the suit failed. There is a photo of Vance, plus a video interview with him. Even after much reconstructive surgery, he has one of the most fucked up faces on Earth. A few years after, he could not take it anymore, got some pills, and killed himself for good. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same if I looked like that.

Idiot Jumps Off Roof and Breaks His Leg: Stupid American teenagers are engaging in some weird sport called roof jumping, where you jump off a roof onto the lawn below. Something goes wrong, the kid lands wrong, and he breaks his leg. You can actually hear the bone snap on the video. Stupidity can be painful!

Nighttime Mobs Attack Cars in Oakland: This is the latest fad in some US Black ghettos. Crowds of young people gather on major street late at night, around 10 or 11 PM, on a weekend nite. Then they start attacking random cars as they drive by. Sometimes they try to pull the doors open to rob or assault drivers. Drivers fight back, hit them, try to run them over, etc. A good time is had by all, or many, or at least the attackers.

Mostly young Oakland Blacks here, but strangely, there are some young White girls there hanging out with the Blacks and attacking cars themselves.

If these fuckers did that to my car, I might try to hit them with my vehicle! I’ve already done so in a similar situation, and the dude went flying after I nailed him with my accelerating car! Don’t ever try this with me, punks!

Man Assaulted in New York Deli: A older White guy is ordering a meal in a New York deli with some young Black guy standing next him. Suddenly, at one point, the Black turns around and cold cocks the White guy, knocking him to the floor! Then he runs out of the building. No further info on where or why this happened, details on the crime, fate of the victim or results of the investigation.

Also lots of older stuff in foreign languages, but most of you won’t be interested in that.

Have fun, sickos!

Extremely Racialized Language and Memes in the Teabagger Movement

Are Teabaggers racists? As usual, it’s an interesting question.

Teabaggers are just Republicans. 8

I’ve known quite a few California Republicans, and not all are racists. Out here they are more about hatred of government and liberals than about race. California Republicans have close friends, date and even marry people of other races. It’s often a White Republican male marrying an Asian (often Republican) male. I’ve known young Republican males who openly dated Black women.

Many of these people would support the Teabaggers, and some were so nuts they would probably go to their rallies.

So the situation is complicated.

Nevertheless, I am on the list for a major Teabagger mailing list. The list owner is the founder and owner of one of the larger Teabagger groups (something like Teaparty USA). Anyway, I get this guy’s mails on a regular basis.

I must say, in all of my years following US politics, I have never seen such blatant racial language, imagery and code words used by any major US political movement. The racial language in these mails is palpable, open, obvious, and clear. It’s actually pretty shocking in the context of US politics.

TEA PARTY PEOPLE DON’T ACT LIKE THE BLACKS DID IN PHILADELPHIA, DETROIT AND WATTS IN THE 1960’s!

Whoa! That’s the headline of a recent Teabagger mail to me. Included was an ad for the Glenn Beck Show. Beck’s racial language these days is really shocking. I swear he sounds more like a White nationalist every day. He’s using the language, imagery and tone of the White nationalist movement on his program regularly. What’s he trying to do?

VOTE EVERY “BABY KILLING” DEMOCRAT OUT OF OFFICE IN 2010, 2011, 2012..MOST DEMOCRATS ARE LIBERALS, JEWS, RACISTS, pro welfare BLACKS AND IDIOTS!..DOES NOT MATTER IF THEY ARE HE’S OR SHE’S…DOES NOT MATTER IF THEY ARE BLACK, WHITE, YELLOW, PINK OR BLUE…DOES NOT MATTER IF THEY ARE CHRISTIANS, JEWS OR…

This one is even worse. Note the anti-Semitism and racism, followed by projection of racism onto non-racist Democrats, followed by the denial of the racism and anti-Semitism later on.

This is pretty typical.

One day I will get a blatantly anti-Semitic email, then the next day, I get a mail accusing Obama of being an anti-Semite for selling out Israel. I get a racist email bashing Blacks, then the next day, I get a mail accusing liberals of being the only real racists, and accusing Blacks of being racists. Then it quotes MLK favorably to top things off.

US White racism is a funny beast these days. It’s really progressed from the days of Bull Connor.

Christians against Abortion; Black Politicians Racists?; Anti-Obama Care; Anti-Give Away to BUMS; Abortion & The Bible; We The People Michigan; Tea Party – Michigan+; Free Speech, 1st Amend; Fire OBAMA & Congress; Election Fraud; Don’t Trust Obama; Discrimination on Race; Free Speech,1st Amendment; Against Welfare 4 Immigrants; Against Welfare Fraud; American 4 Tax Reform; Angry White America; Anti-Give Away to BUMS; Anti-Socialism-Racism; Get BUMS off Welfare; Fleecing White America; Fleecing of America; Fed up with Barack Obama; Fair Reporting; Equal Rights & Social Justice; End Slavery Taxes; End Affirmative Action; Defeat Amnesty

Those are some of their affiliated grouplets.

The Michigan groups are heavily involved with the Michigan Militia movement.

Note that they are calling all Black politicians racists.

Anti-give away to bums means anti-giveaway to Black bums.

Note the strong Christian fundamentalist and anti-abortion sentiment. This runs through all Teabagger posts.

Election fraud means that Obama is not an American, therefore he has no right to be President.

Discrimination on race means discrimination against Whites, the only kind of discrimination these guys care about. The implication, taken straight from the White nationalist playbook, is that all discrimination against non-Whites is over now, and the only remaining discrimination is against the majority.

The anti-tax rhetoric runs through all this stuff. It’s tied in with the anti-Black and anti-immigrant stuff. White tax dollars are going to Blacks and Browns, who don’t deserve it. That’s the subtext.

Note the calls to get rid of affirmative action. That’s not racist per se of course, but in the midst of all this stuff, it’s just one more piece of the puzzle.

Note the attacks on the media. The media is run by liberals, supposedly. No matter how rightwing the media is, it’s never far right enough for Republicans, who keep calling the media liberal in order to keep moving the goalposts and pushing the media further to the Right.

Equal Rights and Social Justice

It appears that White Politicians must look after all the voters but there seems to be a different set of rules for Black and Latino Politicians.

I noticed that retired Florida Senator Mel Martinez did little to nothing about all the illegal immigrants in Florida, the same Martinez retired the day after he voted for Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, also Latino.

What I want to know as a White American Citizen is how do I know that Francisco Rodriguez, running for Florida State House, District 83 or Marco Rubio running for Florida State Senate will look after “All the People”?

I know these are sensitive questions, but they must be asked. These Politicians must be held accountable for their promises while campaigning and stop the lying to get elected!

Thank you, The Christian Patriot from Florida. April 10, 2010.

Whoa! That’s some pretty racialized language against Latinos!

What’s interesting about Teabagger mails is that there are many open references to White Americans. In US politics, that’s usually beyond the pale.

Equal rights and social justice is a play on the use of those terms by the Left. These guys are for equal rights and social justice, but only for Whites. They’re also implying that there no longer exists equal rights or social justice for White Americans. That language is from White nationalism.

THE “N” WORD IS WRONG, JUST LIKE THE HONKY WORD AND WHITE DEVILS WORD IS WRONG!

MAYBE WHITE AMERICA IS TIRED OF PAYING PUBLIC ASSISTANCE AND WELFARE, TIRED OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, TIRED OF ALL BLACK COLLEGES, ALL BLACK NEWSPAPERS, ALL BLACK UNITED NEGRO COLLEGE FUND, THE NAACP, RACIAL AGITATORS JACKSON, SHARPTON AND WRIGHT?

Maybe White America is very unhappy with the Democratic Party forcing them to support illegal immigrants so that the Democrats get the Latino vote?

WHITE AMERICA MAY BE TIRED OF CAREER BUMS ON WELFARE FOR 50 YEARS OR MAYBE THEY ARE TIRED OF PAYING FOR OTHERS PEOPLES REPRODUCTION ACTS?

Maybe White America is tired of all the Black violence and crime?

MAYBE WHITE AMERICA IS TIRED BECAUSE PRESIDENT OBAMA AND ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER, BOTH BLACK, DID NOT PROSECUTE THE BLACK PANTHERS FOR BREAKING VOTING LAW ON ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 2008…WHEN ARE THESE TWO POWERFUL BLACK MEN GOING TO END AFFIRMATIVE ACTION?

MAYBE THESE ARE REASONS THAT THESE THREE BLACK CONGRESSMEN ALLEGEDLY HEARD THE “N” WORD!

Whoa! That’s some really racialized language! Darn. I can’t remember the last time I saw that coming out of any major US political movement. That sounds like it’s copied from the commenters at American Renaissance .

American racism has moved way beyond Nordicism. The guy who sends me that stuff is an Italian guy from Florida.

The Teabagger movement is more about US White politics versus US Hispanic or Black politics. As such, they are dying for Black traitors to go to their racist parties and line up behind this White racist movement. There have always been Blacks who were willing to sell out their race and line up with the enemy.

Less ferocious forms of White racism (less virulent than say Jim Crow, segregation or slavery) use anti-Black Blacks to further the White racist project. In this way, they don’t hate all Blacks per se, and the racist nature of the project becomes foggy and hard to see.

All in all, based on the extremely racialized language they are using (shocking in the context of a major US political movement), I must say that this is one of the most openly and virulently White racist major US political movements I’ve seen in a long time. By virulent I do not mean to equate them with segregationists, slavers or Jim Crow folks. US White racism has moved beyond that for the most part and has evolved into a more benign, though still very racist, movement.

Teabagger Rally, Circa 1960

Notice how pro-Black = Communism in 1960? Now we have a proud pro-Black Black man in the Presidency in 2010, and pro-Black = Communism once again.

Same people, different decade.

Via this excellent, but very long, post at Daily Kos. The post is very long, but you might want to look through it. The liberals there are actually debating what role racism plays in the Teabaggers. It’s not an entirely unreasonable argument.

Honestly, it’s hard to say what role racism plays in the Teabaggers.

Sure, there is a Black Agenda and a White Agenda in the US. The Teabaggers are for the White Agenda and against the Black Agenda. They see this President as a “traitor” President. Not one of us – not an American, not a citizen, a Muslim, get it? Not one of us – he’s not White! However, most Teabaggers are more sophisticated than most White nationalists.

WN’s in general oppose Obama because he is, as they put it, “the latest outrage, a Negro President.” Most WN’s will not accept any Black as President, no matter his politics or agenda.

The Teabaggers in general are much more sophisticated than that. American White racism is subtle and hard to pick up on unless you are used to the code words.

The Teabaggers will use any Black who is anti-Black agenda and pro-White agenda. That is, Black traitors and sell-outs to Whitey are A-OK with most tea partiers. This is why the Teabaggers are so hard to figure out. The Teabaggers will gladly support any Black pol who backs their agenda and supports White America against his people.

So their opposition to Obama is not “based on the fact that he is Black.” He’s a Black who’s working for the Blacks, and in US White America, that’s called working for the enemy .

There is much discussion in the thread about whether or not Teabaggers have it in for poor Whites too. No one knows.

The Right in the US, from the KKK all the way down, always feared that low-income Whites would unite with low-income Blacks on class terms, and they’ve always sought to throw a wedge between that incipient alliance. They succeeded very well.

There is a good argument that Prohibition was a WASP project by WASP’s outraged at the drunkenness and Underclass behavior of “non-Whites” such as the Irish and the Italians. Prohibition was really a White Supremacy project.

When Prohibition ended, it was replaced immediately with marijuana prohibition. This was sold to frightened Whites on the basis that Underclass Mexicans and Blacks were smoking weed, getting horny and screwing White girls or killing White people. Worse, they were corrupting Whites with Underclass Black and Brown values. Marijuana Prohibition was a White Supremacy project.

Under FDR, Whites were adamant that they be allowed to discriminate for WPA jobs. And they did discriminate a lot. FDR tried to stop it by forcing WPA projects in the South to hire both Blacks and Whites, but it was a tough haul.

Notably, Social Security and other social protections were initially denied to farm workers and domestic workers . In the 1930’s, these classes of employees were for the most part Black. The sentiment at the time was the same as now – Whites saying, “I don’t want my tax dollars going to those people.” It was Tea Party 1934.

When Reagan came in, poverty was rewritten to mean “Black.” The phony and nonexistent welfare queen was created. I see this backlash as a reaction against the Civil Rights Liberation of the 1960’s. It was another Reconstruction reactionary backlash, the 2nd or 3rd Reconstruction if you will. Every time Blacks get some rights, there’s a White backlash to withdraw many of the rights newly granted.

There have always been plenty of White poor. Go to West Virginia sometime and look around. But for the last 30 years at least, poverty has been rewritten to mean “Black.” Poor = Black and increasingly Brown. When Teabaggers say that Obama is for the poor and against them, they mean he is for the Blacks and the Browns and against the Whites.

The problem in the US is that racism is all tied up in issues of class. Class and race are mingled in America for so long now that it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other ends. That’s why discussions about whether or not the Teabaggers are racist are ultimately futile. Until you understand the American race-class marriage and the decades-long use of code words for racialized projects, the discussion isn’t going anywhere.

I’m Ethnocentric and I Don’t Care If Whites Go Extinct

Someone asked me how one could feel pride in being White, but then not care if Whites go extinct. They inferred it was a conundrum.

But it isn’t. This is simply the way that all tribes have been all down through time. Few tribes, other than the Jews, have cared about genetic purity. Tribal membership or nationality was defined by, you know, sane things, like a common language, culture, religion, etc.

You could always marry into the group, as long as you assimilated to their language, culture and religion, in general no matter what your genes looked like. American Indian tribes were like this. They took Whites and Blacks into their tribes, and of course intermarried with other tribes, as they cared not one whit for genetic purity. The White or Black simply became just another Cherokee by marrying into the tribe and adopting their culture, language and religion.

That’s really the only sane way to be ethnocentric, and it’s the way that ethnocentrism has worked for millenia in human tribes.

As far as pride in being White, well I’m happy to be me, and I love my people, but I’m not concerned about our continuing existence or White extinction.

There’s nothing weird about that – I figure most Whites are like this. Careful surveys have shown that ~7

Actually, you will find this in most groups. I worked for an Indian tribe, and there was one full-blood left out of 800. The remaining ones were continuing to intermarry like crazy with non-tribals and even non-Indians. Obviously, genetic extinction is very important to them, but they never mentioned it once. They simply did not care about genetic extinction.

Nevertheless, the ethnocentrism of this tribe was off the charts. They were as ethnocentric as White nationalists, or worse.

Do Blacks care if Blacks go extinct? What does it mean anyway? WN White extinction means pure Whites will be gone. Well, pure Blacks are already gone in the US, so Blacks are already extinct here. Since Blacks are already extinct in the US in WN sense, why worry about Black extinction?

Do Hispanics care about extinction? Of course not? What sort of line even exists that could go genetically extinct? Hispanics are a genetic Cuisinart turned on high. There’s nothing to go extinct; there’s no pure race to take out.

Few, if any, tribes or nationalities on Earth are concerned about going genetically extinct, even tribes that ought to be. I’m not sure why that is, but I think it’s because most sane humans don’t care about the genetic purity of their race. It’s not healthy human thinking. Most sane humans think of tribal extinction in terms of the loss of language, culture, or religion, things like that. But it’s proving almost impossible to stop even those sorts of tragic losses. Life marches on nonetheless, and the appeal of global culture and an improved life is a strong one.

Most tribes around the world have figured out that you can’t regulate marriage and sex. Some of the more ethnocentric ones try to maintain the tribal language or religion even after intermarriage, but intermarriage has a way of taking those things out. The general attitude among endangered cultures and languages around the world seems, “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Have you noticed that the only group on Earth yelling about the genetic extinction of their race is the WN’s? That’s because pretty much only WN lunatics care about genes and genetic purity. Most others think it’s a laughably stupid argument, and mass intermarriage is an unstoppable juggernaut anyway.

Who Says Black Chicks are Ugly?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J96ujGstSUw]

This is a video of a Black star who I’d never heard of, Kiely Williams, doing a song called “Spectacular.” The song really sucks – stupid, irresponsible and possibly dangerous bullshit. She goes to a bar, gets totally wasted, gets picked up by some guy, goes home with him, passes out drunk (!) to where she’s unconscious, and then gets laid by him while she is passed out drunk. Which makes the guy a rapist asshole and makes her a complete idiot. Nevertheless, it was all worth it because the sex was so great. Yeah, great for him. Since she was passed out, so she could not experience that greatness. The feminists are upset about the video, as they ought to be.

Anyway, this Black chick, Kiely Williams, is definitely a babe. I don’t see where these racists get off calling her ugly. Screw em.

It’s an article of faith among White Nationalists (WN’s) that all Black women are automatically ugly. I’m not sure at what point they have enough White in them to be good looking, maybe 2/3 or so. Anyway, attractive Black females simply do not exist.

This is pretty much the same with White anti-Black racists in general. Black women are automatically hideous. I once suggested to a friend of mine that some of them were darn fine looking. “Yeah!” He huffed. “If they’ve got some White in them!” Then he looked disgusted: “It looks like an ape!” he belted out. Since I was dating a Black girl at the time, there wasn’t much to say .

But this is a common White racist view. Black per se is de facto ugly, no ifs ands or buts about it. The only redeeming factor for Black women, and the only thing capable of making them good-looking, is White blood, preferably the more the better.

As Whites, we are brought to up to believe that Black features are not attractive, but it does take some reinforcement to make it sink in, males being the horny bastards that we are.

I remember when I was a young man, my friends and I frequently spoke of “Black foxes,” and how much we wanted one, mostly for the adventure of it. Black women really hate this kind of thinking, calling it “the White man who wants his jungle fantasy,” but I guess it’s better than writing them all off.

The main thing is that we Whites are not used to Black features. We are brought up with all White people, and that’s who we think is good looking. When I was growing up (pre-MTV era), there were few attractive Blacks in the media. Black features look sort of strange, odd or weird to most of us Whites, exotic at best, even if we don’t think they are ugly per se.

After looking at Black women for a long time, I finally realized that a lot of them actually are beautiful, but Black beauty is an acquired taste, like wine or coffee -most don’t like it at first, but it grows on you if you let it. There are many Black women, even very dark ones, who are strikingly attractive. That is, once you develop that acquired taste.

There is a Black woman who lives next door to me with a 15 year old daughter. Both are very dark, and the mother is quite heavy. But if you look at their faces, there is something knock-out drop dead gorgeous beautiful about them, once again, once you develop that acquired taste.

I’m glad I learned to appreciate the unique beauty that Black women have. It makes the world of women that much more of a beautiful, exciting and exotic place.

Are Lebanese White?

White nationalists (WN’s) typically say that all Lebanese are non-Whites, and in fact, they usually hate them, since they hate all non-Whites.

We get into the issue of who is White. Probably ~8

According to Nordicists, Irish, British, Icelandics, Faroese, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, French, Swiss, Northern Italians, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Russians are all White. These are the only White people.

Typically, Spaniards, Portuguese, Southern Italians, Croatians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Albanians, Kosovars, Macedonians, Bosnians, Greeks, Turks, Jews and Armenians are defined as non-Whites. Furthermore, everyone outside of Europe is automatically defined as non-White, which is preposterous and makes no sense, although some will say that Iranians are White.

This has always struck me as utterly insane. The only logical view of who is White is anyone who is part of the European native peoples or looks like they could be one of the European native peoples. We might have a tough case with the Lapps though, who are partly Asiatic.

By this view, Spaniards, Portuguese, Southern Italians, Croatians, Montenegrins, Serbs, Albanians, Kosovars, Macedonians, Bosnians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Georgians, Azeris, Iranians and Caucasus people are all White, flat out. No argument.

Furthermore, there are folks outside of Europe who look like Whites. So we could divide extra-European Caucasians into White Caucasians and non-White Caucasians. Therefore, while many Arabs, Berbers, Pakistanis, Indians, etc. are not White, there are indeed White Arabs, White Berbers, White Pakistanis and even White Indians. How do we know which is which? Mostly phenotype.

A classic example of White Arabs would be these Lebanese women demonstrating against Syria in the 2005 Color Revolution. Most of these women are probably Maronite Christians. Christian Arabs, even in Iraq, are often the Whitest Arabs of all for unknown reasons, possibly because they did not own slaves and therefore breed with their slaves as the Muslims did.

Look at the women in those pics. Where do these WN dickwads get off saying these chicks are not White? What a bunch of tools these WN’s are.

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I Say Quarantine Him

All right, Nushan, that does it. That mug shot just screams, "Quarantine me!" You just got convicted. Court of public opinion is adjourned.

As a civil libertarian, I’m generally opposed to quarantining HIV-positive people or AIDS patients, despite Cuba’s good experiences. However, I will make one exception for Nushan Williams, just getting out of prison after serving 12 years for infecting 12 females, 7 women, a 13-, 15-, 16- and two 17-year old girls, apparently all White, with HIV, which he had been told that he had, although he thought the medical staff were lying to run him out of town and he didn’t believe them. Two passed it on to their kids, and one passed it on to her boyfriend.

He had moved from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood to Jamestown, a White Western New York town devastated by manufacturing loss and experiencing rapid lumpenization. He said he was a Bloods gang member, and quickly become a popular drug dealer, and charmed his way into hundreds of girls’ beds, almost all of them White. His relationships with the women were characterized by brutality, physical abuse and drug use.

That’s what you get for fucking gangsters, wigger chicks.

He actually slept with 300 women and girls by age 21. Wow! That’s three times as many as Sexmaniacman, and Sexman is past 40!

Nushan continued to act horrible the whole time he was in prison, repeatedly being sanctioned for throwing bodily fluids, fighting, threats, possession of drugs and weapons, the usual. Obviously he hasn’t changed one bit. Officials say he has “problems in self-regulation.” Indeed, and in spades.

Officials are sentencing him to a mental hospital because he can’t control himself, he’s horny as fuck, and he thinks about screwing lots of chicks all the time. Nothing wrong with that, but if you’re HIV-positive and as irresponsible as this POS is, that’s going to be a problem.

Health authorities have a right to quarantine folks who have an infectious disease that they refuse to treat and are in danger of infecting others due to their negligence. If you don’t want to get quarantined, don’t act like a lobotomized gangsta if you’re HIV-positive.

I say quarantine the bastard. Either that or ship him back to Africa*, preferably a country with a very high HIV rate, assuming they will take him. Plenty of Black men all over Africa are acting just like this guy. He’d be right at home.

*Of course I’m opposed to the racist BS of “ship the Blacks back to Africa,” but I will make a few rare exceptions in cases like these.

US Blacks Make Great Educational Gains

Here.

From the paper:

In the United States, based on a national assessment of adult literacy, African Americans improved their scores more than any other racial/ethnic group in the years between 1992 and 2003. The survey measured three elements of literacy: prose, document, and quantitative literacy – which are reading, synthesizing information from documents and graphs, and basic math.ch are reading, synthesizing information from documents and graphs, and basic math.

There’s an agenda behind most of the White nationalist and race realist arguments about Blacks. It should be no surprise that almost all such folks are conservative to reactionary, and many are out and out libertarians. They nearly all subscribe to the philosophy of minimal government and a free market. Such an agenda always decimates public education, but that’s how they want it. They’re either going to home school, send their kids to private schools, or they’re idiots.

There’s a reason that they continually harp on lower Black IQ’s and fall all over themselves to say that the Black IQ has been flat for 100 years. This means that Blacks are, for all intents and purposes, ineducable. Any money you spend on educating them is money down the rathole since they’re incapable of learning. This is a very convenient argument for moneyed Whites who hate the public schools. If educating Blacks is useless, let’s just quit educating them and cut them off. Think of all those nice White tax dollars you could save.

Marx was right in a sense. Everything isn’t all about economics, but in the modern world, so much of life surely is.

And with the White nationalists and race realists, there’s an ugly economic argument behind all the racist rhetoric: “I don’t want my hard-earned White tax dollars going to educate useless niggers.” This is the thought process underlying a lot of the anti-government movement in the US for the past 30 years. I know. I’ve lived in rightwing White communities all those years, and I know exactly how my people think. The rightwing revolution, from Reagan on, was about a lot of things, but it was so about race.

Above we see that one of their prime arguments is a lie. Turns out Blacks are educable after all. Turns out that they can improve over time, giving the lie to the sly hereditarian assumption that Black achievement will be frozen by genetic constraints.

On the NAEP, Blacks have reduced the gap by about 1/3. You would never know this if you went to a White nationalist site. All they do is rant that there’s been no progress.

Blacks now nearly match Whites on vocabulary, controlling for socioeconomic status.

Controlling for economic status, Blacks now nearly match Whites on vocabulary. So increasing Black economic status raises Black vocabulary scores dramatically. At the same time, rising White economic status had no effect on scores.

Young Blacks have closed the B-W IQ gap by 5.5 points over 30 years.

Young Blacks have closed the B-W IQ gap by 5.5 points over 30 years. However, this applies only to Black minors. By age 24, the gain is all lost, and the B-W IQ gap is the same. One thing that is very interesting is that Black 5 year olds have IQ’s of 98 (US White IQ = 103). That’s only 5 points below US White IQ’s. People say it’s because Blacks mature faster, but that seems like a lousy argument. Black kids score about the same as Black adults in Africa.

On the cynical side, I could note that environmental effects are greatest in childhood. As one moves into adulthood, environmental effects diminish, and genetic effects tend to predominate.

However, this data does show that the extremely rich Western environment of the US is dramatically raising the IQ’s of Black children. It is interesting that this gap closing has occurred in the past 30 years, which coincides with Liberation from 1964-on. There may be hope yet.

All this positive news aside, any discussion of B-W achievement gap that does not include talk about IQ is useless. Yet that’s what passes for policy debate in the US.

The gap may never be entirely closable, but surely it can be reduced.

Is Afrikaans Close to English?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtKKJSfYraU&feature=related]

Cruising around the Net researching my piece on the Dutch languages, I read up on Afrikaans quite a bit. Afrikaans is the language, very close to Dutch, spoken in South Africa. It seems to be a Dutch dialect from a few centuries ago. It’s rather close to Flemish, and of course it is close to Dutch. It is often described as a simplified Dutch, and some Dutch speakers feel it almost resembles Dutch “baby-talk” or child speech. There are theories that Afrikaans is a creole (a simplified form of a language) but these seem to be discarded, though it does have influences from other languages, especially English and various African languages.

A number of English speakers on the Net said that as an English speaker, they could either communicate or almost communicate with Afrikaans speakers, each using their own language. I decided to test that out by listening to the “De La Rey” video above. There were English subtitles, but I turned my head away so I could not read them and just listened to the song trying to figure out English words.

If you listen to it with the subtitles up there, you can see a lot of cognates, but when we talk to other humans, we don’t get subtitles floating over each other’s heads so we can understand better.

I could hardly understand one single word of the Afrikaans speech in this song. I got Transvaal, but that’s just a place name, and your average uneducated American would never pick that up. I also got flammen, and I thought that might be flame. Close, it’s fire. The idea that Afrikaans and English are the slightest bit intelligible in spoken form is not supported.

Anyway, it’s a cool song. You might as well check it out. It’s banned in South Africa, though there’s nothing racist about the song. It talks about the Boer War, in which the Afrikaans speaking Boers fought against the British military around 1904 or so.

Your more educated White nationalists around the world love this war for some reason. I’m not really up on what the war was all about – apparently an anti-colonial rebellion? Anyway, this Boer War is an integral part of the South African legendary history of their time in this land, hence this song is part of their heritage. Where these Blacks think it’s racist, I don’t understand.

Goodbye and Good Riddance

Eugene Terreblanche was just murdered by Black farm workers in a wage dispute. A few years back, Terreblanche got into it with a Black guy at a gas station and severely beat the guy. The Black guy suffered serious brain damage as a result. I don’t know the details of the incident.

Eugene Terreblanche made racial hatred his whole raison d’ etre, and he reaped the hatred that his karma sowed. What comes around, goes around; paybacks are a bitch; you get out of this world what you put into it. Insert favorite aphorism here.

See that swastika-looking AWB insignia in the background? That’s not an accidental design. If being a White advocate means sticking up for bastards like this, I’d almost rather throw in with the Abagonds, but it ain’t much of a choice.

Terreblanche was a White nationalist hero, and there are a lot of comments on White nationalist sites about the White farmer murders. It is a very serious problem.

But it’s not some extermination campaign because they are White. As with most rural violence, it’s tied up in land tenure. If those White farmers had as much land as your average Black farmer did, they wouldn’t be getting killed any more than anyone else in South Africa. Those few White farmers have most of the farmland, and almost all of the good farmland, in the country.

The Blacks were removed from the land, banana republic style, to squatter “homelands” which quickly become overpopulated, overfarmed and badly eroded. But it was shitty land anyway (Malan 1990). Meanwhile, ~

Obviously, there needs to be some kind of a land reform, but it’s been stalled. The Black farmers are landless or have tiny and infertile plots, and they are attacking the White farmers to kill them and take over their land. Were a decent land reform done, none of this would be happening.

By the way, if you want to read an awesome book by a White South African that is coming from something like the Liberal Race Realism of this blog, check out the reference.

References

Malan, Rian. 1990. My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

The World of the Bully and PC Anti-White Cultural Marxism

In the comments section, Bay Area Guy talks about the perpetually grievanced world of the intellectual non-White Cultural Marxist permavictims.

I’m going to riff on that by bringing up the stuff I dealt with for decades in my own crazy family. I don’t care if they read this, I don’t care what they do about it, and I don’t care who it pisses off. If they don’t want this going out to the whole world via the Intertubes, they should think again about how they treat me.

Bay Area Guy:

At the same time, if you visit blogs such as Abagond, angry black woman, Unapologetic Mexican, or other non-white blogs, all they talk about is white racism and the mindset of white people.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how offensive the approach of these Black and Hispanic Cultural Marxists is. Even when you bend over backwards and try to accommodate them, it’s like we are never doing good enough. I go to Abagond, and a lot of times it is chastening. I think, “Wow, so this is what we are doing that is pissing off Blacks. Ok, let’s stop doing it.”

Then I resolve to do better.

But the grievance never ends, no matter how hard I try to do better. I’m still a White racist jerk, no matter what.

It’s like someone who hates you because supposedly you don’t act right, so you say, “Ok, I’m going to try to act right to get this person to like me.” You spend decades doing this, and no matter what you do it’s never good enough, and the whole time they are blaming you for the fact that they hate you.

Why do they hate me? Because I’m bad! They’re justified!

Wow, I need to stop being bad.

So you spend decades trying to “be good” to get these people to stop hating you, and they just keep moving the goalposts, keep on hating you, and keep blaming you for the fact that they are haters.

I dealt with this shit in my own White middle class suburban family for decades, and frankly it’s just bullying tactics. The person blaming me for the fact that he hates me is a bully. No matter what I do, the bully keeps on picking on me, laughing at me, ridiculing me, hating me and blaming me for everything.

I can never do anything right, the bully hates me, and it’s all my fault. I keep trying to do better, and eventually I get self-esteem problems because I think I’m bad and deserve to be hated.

What these intellectual Blacks do to us feels like the bullying I dealt with in my own family. They’re bullying us Whites. They pick on us, they ridicule us, they laugh at us and they hate us. And just like in my family, if I try to fight back even

In the bully’s world, Poland is always attacking Germany. You’re always Poland and the bully’s always Germany. If you try to defend yourself in the tiniest way, the bully flips out, goes nuts and turns it all around so the bully is the victim and the victim fighting back against the bully is the evil, psycho, sociopathic, criminal aggressor.

Some of us Whites are liberals, and we keep trying to be good non-racists and get these people to stop hating us. No matter how good we try to be, they keep on hating us and blaming us for the fact that they hate us. White liberals get low self-esteem and start thinking that Blacks hate us justifiably because were are perma-defective in some way.

After ages of this, you finally just throw up your hands and decide that the non-White bullies simply cannot be appeased. You’ve been trying to appease them for years, just like the jerks in your family, and it’s all hopeless. They’re going to hate us forever, they will blame us for them hating us, and no matter what we do, it will never be enough. The sane Whites will just say, “Fuck you, I’m done with you, and I’m keeping away from you,” just like the bullies in your own family.

Now, granted, if you study the history of Jim Crow in the US closely, it’s quite clear that this bully routine was par for the course under Jim Crow. Under Jim Crow, Whites bullied Blacks for decades, and Blacks just suffered in silence. If the Black man ever stood up to raise one pinky finger to fight back, Poland was attacking Germany once again and the poor victim, transformed into monster criminal, was hanging from tree, while crowds of grinning White murderers were transformed into outraged super-victims.

If you look at photos of Nazis dealing with Jews in Germany, especially in the early years, you see this same sort of bullying, with the Jews doing the same abject victim thing.

So it’s not anything unique to any one race or other. The tendency to bully others is simply a human one. Personally, I think it’s childish, and I don’t think adults should pick on or bully other adults. Are you still in high school? That’s something kids do. Adults don’t bully each other. It’s profoundly shameful.

“Racist!”

Note: This post is extremely long, at 108 pages, so be forewarned. However, it’s very good, and I think it’s well worth your time.

There is not a whole lot I can add to this seminal work by a University of Montana Professor of English named Paul Trout. The piece speaks for itself. Here it is, 15 years later, and not a single thing has changed,  has it? This means that serious forms of PC insanity have devastated our universities, and from there, spread, virus-like, into society at large for over two decades now. In the meantime, in the past 20-25 years, things have only gotten worse for non-Whites in general, Blacks and Hispanics in particular.

So, while a blatantly White racist politics has held sway over the nation, causing serious harm to various non-Whites as Whites attacked them, at the same time, an idiot PC Idiocracy has held a Dictatorship of the Idiotariot over society as a whole. One wonders what good this PC silliness does, other than just spreading even more stupidity and insanity through a society that has too much of both already.

The PC Idiot Class has not been able to prevent a White racist politics from gripping the nation, yet it has gone on a jihad against a bunch of a nonsense, and its most frequent victims were non-racist and even anti-racist Whites. One wonders how any of the incidents below affected any US Black or Hispanics polities as a whole in any real and meaningful way. They didn’t. So all PC madness is attack innocent Whites, usually, most perversely of all, the liberal ones who are friendliest to non-Whites.

The main conclusion that we liberal Whites draw from all this looniness is that minorities are nothing but trouble. Blacks in particular. Read the article below and I defy you to conclude that modern PC Blacks are anything but a heap of ridiculous problems waiting to blow up on you at any unknown time. The only sensible conclusion Whites, even non-racist ones, draw from PC madness is that minorities, particularly Blacks but to a lesser extent Hispanics, Amerindians and other Professional Victims, are just not worth the trouble and are best avoided.

If you read below, you will notice that the only sane people protesting the PC lunacy are conservatives, particularly White racist conservatives. Great. So White people can either be PC professional flagellants or they can defy it and be White racist jerks. Well! That’s certainly one Hell of a choice!

Conservatives are so crazy and wrong on most everything that anytime the conservatives are right, you know the Left must be catastrophically screwed up. It embarrasses me to no end that the only folks making sense below are the rightwing nasties at US News and World Report and the Wall Street Journal. Where are all the sane liberals? On vacation, I guess. Or, worse, afraid of being called racist.

Cruising around the Black blogosphere, you note that the PC nonsense below is the standard view on race at most intelligent Black blogs. This is a classical, and typical, example. And on many Hispanic blogs too. And, I am sad to say, it’s the standard view on most of the leftwing sites I read.

This piece was originally found on this site here. That’s a White racist site, and so is Nicholas Stix, probably, though I guess Nick has an excuse for being racist (he experienced a lot of terrible treatment by Blacks). One again, we see that the only folks promoting this eminently sane piece are racist Whites. How sad!

(This landmark monograph was originally published in 1995 in direct link nor the “Racist!” as an Epithet of Repression

Paul Trout

Dept of English

Montana State U – Bozeman

Montana Professor Journal

Fall 1995

Introduction

About the worst thing you can be called nowadays is “racist.” The word not only brands a person as intellectually and morally inferior but links him or her to hooded sickos who beat and lynch innocent minorities. And the accusation – whether merited or not – often brings stinging penalties, from shunning to firing. Ask Senator Conrad Burns, Andy Rooney, Jimmy the Greek, Marge Schott, or Christina Jeffrey. No wonder people who subscribe to liberal social and intellectual ideals, who abhor race prejudice, fear being branded with the scarlet “R.”

Since the term carries so much social opprobrium and can hurt a person’s private life and public career, it should be defined clearly and used cautiously. This is not the case, however, on today’s college campuses. The examples in this essay suggest that on college campuses across the country, the epithet “racist,” hard enough for dictionaries to define (see “Defining Racism,” Chronicles, August 1994, 46), has become alarmingly unmoored.

We have now reached a point where the term can be used, usually without explanation or justification, to stigmatize any policy, statement, symbol, statistic, outcome, word or expression that any minority member does not like, including all kinds of legitimate, scholarly, and protected material.

As Robert Hughes observes in The Culture of Complaint, the irresponsible and promiscuous use of “racist” has robbed the term of “whatever stable meaning it once had” (19). Even worse, since its use is sanctioned by the subjectivity of the user, there can be no false accusations of “racism.” In short, anyone accused of “racism” is ipso facto guilty.

As a result, the epithet “racist” has become a powerful weapon of intimidation, the contemporary equivalent of the 1950s charge of “communism.” Since nobody on campus wants to be labeled a “racist,” and since nobody knows what the term means, most people stay clear of saying or doing anything that some minority member may label as “racist.” Out of fear, most people – and especially Whites – studiously avoid touchy issues, provocative statements, or ambiguous symbols or behaviors.

Unfortunately, as the examples in this essay show, not everybody succeeds in avoiding trouble. An untoward statement, word, metaphor or observation, even an unpalatable research finding, can catapult a student, faculty member, or administrator, into the category of “racist” with regrettable results.

Of “Racist” Epithets There Is No End

Campus speech codes forbid and provide punishment for certain types of expressive behavior which causes an individual or group to feel demeaned or abused because of their racial or ethnic background (so long as they are non-White). Such codes are often said to be aimed at only the most outrageous ”ethnic slurs” and “racial epithets” (Cass Sunstein, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, 198).

But anybody staying abreast of this issue knows that speech codes have been invoked to punish all kinds of acts and statements, from quoting upsetting statistics to evincing “disrespect” (see Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors, 26).

Part of the problem with these codes is that they do not emphasize the objective content of the behavior or language, but the subjective response of the self-proclaimed victim. So an “ethnic slur” or “racial epithet” is whatever that person deems it to be. Another problem is that these codes – remarkably – never list the epithets that they forbid.

What words or epithets are “racist”? The only right answer is, more and more of them. Now even the noun “Jew” is “racist,” according to WordPerfect 6.0’s Grammatik, which warns us to “avoid using this offensive term.” So is the verb “to welch,” according to the Welsh-American Legal Defense, Education, and Development Fund. So is “digger pines” (Pinus sabiniana), according to a curator at the California State Indian Museum, who claims it is a slur on Native Americans.

So is “spook,” as in “Spook Hill” (in Mesa, Arizona), according to the NAACP, even though it refers to ghosts who haunt the area (in Phoenix, there was a brouhaha over Squaw Peak).

Given people’s notorious and awe-inspiring linguistic inventiveness (see A. A. Roback’s Dictionary of International Slurs) and their exquisite sensitivity to grievance, the list of offensive epithets will keep going and going…It is already quite long.”

An author who gave a talk at Harvard on why liberals like Jack Kerouac were drawn to Black culture provoked protests by entitling his talk, quoting Kerouac, “Spade Kicks” ( CHE 10 June 1992). The phrase “playing goalie Kamikazestyle” was deleted from a story in a textbook because it was construed to be an ethnic slur (Campus Reports, December 1992).

Even the word “slave” is now dangerous to use. An Education Commission in New York recommended in 1991 that the word “slave” be replaced with “enslaved person” in all school textbooks. Students at historically Black Prairie View Texas A&M University complained that they were offended by the Latin term servitium, in the school’s motto Recercare, Doctrina, Servitium, because in the Middle Ages it allegedly meant slavery. Regents approved the following translation: “Research, Teaching, Service” (CHE, 3 August 1994, A4).

Murray Dolfman was fired for using this word. When no one in his University of Pennsylvania law class knew what the Thirteenth Amendment forbade, he said according to his version), “We have ex-slaves here who should know about the Thirteenth Amendment,” (in Kindly Inquisitors, 148-149). He also referred to himself as an ex-slave (as a Jewish ’slave unto Pharaoh’).

When several Black students complained after class, Dolfman apologized but that did no good. Black students invaded his class and read a list of accusations to Dolfman’s students. News of Dolfman’s amazingly clumsy remark convulsed the campus for weeks, and Houston Baker, the well-known scholar of Black literature, engaged in a little signifying by publicly denouncing Dolfman as an “asshole…unqualified to teach dogs” (Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue, 112).

Dolfman’s contract was not renewed. Richard Bernstein draws this moral from the Dolfman affair: “In the era of political correctness and craven university administrations, the charge of racism, unsubstantiated but accompanied by a few demonstrations and angry rhetorical perorations, suffices to paralyze a campus, to destroy a reputation, and to compel an administration into submission,” (Dictatorship of Virtue, 114-115).

Other words one should stay away from include – according to the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri – ”shiftless,” “fried chicken” (“a loaded phrase when used carelessly”), and “watermelon.” In 1987 at Harvard, Stephen Thernstrom, a respected historian of race relations, was accused of “racism” by students because he used the words “American Indian” and “Oriental” (Maclean’s, 27 May 1991; Lingua Franca, April 1991, 37).

At the University of Virginia Law School, a hapless White guy got into trouble simply trying to be hip when he shot back at one Black student, “Can you dig it, man?” The next day an anonymous note called the teacher a “racist” and a “White supremacist,” without regard to his pro bono work for the civil rights movement, his membership in Klanwatch, and his work in recruiting minorities to campus (D’Souza, Illiberal Education, 6).

At Antioch, Ralph Luker, an associate professor of History and a civil rights activist, was denounced as a “racist” when he said that in the eyes of the law, slaves in the antebellum South had the same legal status as domestic animals. Students thought that he was comparing Black people to animals and took over his class in protest (CHE, 17 June 1994, 4D; 22 June, A14). Afterward, he was denied tenure.

A political science professor at the University of British Columbia (my alma mater) said, during a discussion of apartheid, that “Blacks were at the bottom of the totem pole in South Africa,” (Globe and Mail, 6 August 1994, D7). One student felt the metaphor to be a “racist” appropriation of the sacred symbols of the Kwakiutl and the Haida.

And everyone in the country now has been alerted not to use “water buffalo” within the hearing of Blacks. One night in January, 1993, a group of Black sorority women were dancing and chanting outside a dormitory window at 3 a.m. Several dorm residents shouted for the women to be quiet, and apparently some racial epithets were exchanged.

One student, Eden Jacobowitz, shouted “Shut up, you water buffalo. If you’re looking for a party there is a zoo a mile from here.” (CHE, July 7, 1993, A32). (The women claimed he said, “Shut up, you Black water buffaloes,” and “Go back to the zoo where you belong!”; see “The Raging Water Buffalo” by John K. Wilson, in The Newsletter of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, 2 [2], Fall 1993, 11-12).

The five female students charged Jacobowitz with “racial harassment” under the university’s vague hate-speech code (Scott Shepard, “Penn: The Most Poisoned Ivy?” Campus 5 [1], Fall 1993, 6).

Jacobowitz, an Israel-born Yeshiva student, used the word “water buffalo” because it was the English translation for the Hebrew word “behemah” (there are various spellings for this word), which means “water oxen” and is used as slang to describe an inconsiderate or foolish person. “It was the furthest thing from my mind to call them anything racial,” he said (CHE, 5 May 1993, A39).

During preliminary hearings, Penn Judicial Inquiry Officer Robin Reed asked Jacobowitz if he had been “thinking racial thoughts” on the night his supposed offense took place. She also explained that “water buffalo” could be taken as a racial slur because it “is a dark, primitive animal that lives in Africa” (AP, 14 May 1993). Reed is wrong. The animal is native to southeast Asia.

Although several Black faculty members were asked to testify that “water buffalo” is not a racial slur (until now, at any rate), John Wilson has argued that the fact that the phrase “is not a common racial epithet hardly makes it immune from use in a racist way.” In other words, any word can be used as a “racist” epithet. Charges against Jacobowitz were eventually dropped.

Students and faculty must be especially wary of potentially “racist” color words nowadays. Recently, at Columbia University, “chocolate” and “vanilla” were held to be “racist” after two White students who worked for the escort service were overheard by a Black security guard referring to certain escortees as “chocolate” or “vanilla.” The students explained that chocolate merely meant “attractive” and vanilla “unattractive” or “plain.”

The director of the service, however, summarily fired them for uttering “blatantly racist” remarks (see Dogmatic Wisdom, 84).

In a similar vein, the U. of Missouri stylebook warns writers to stay clear of using the word “articulate” when describing Blacks, saying that it implies that most Blacks are not articulate. In other words, it could be “racist” to say to a minority student, “because you are extremely articulate, you will probably excel in my class.”

Hunting Indians, Minutemen, and other “Racist” Mascots

The Sherlocks of Sensitivity have found “racist” messages not only in the most neutral and honorific expressions but in all kinds of university logos, mascots, and icons.

American Indians have been particularly assiduous in finding “racism” in any and every use of Indian names and images. Over the last ten years or so, their campaign to get colleges to drop team names, logos, and mascots associated with Indian culture has been very successful.

This campaign took a new twist early this year when five students at the University of Illinois filed a complaint with the Illinois’ Human Rights Commission, claiming that the school’s mascot, Chief Illiniwek, causes a “hostile and abusive” environment for American Indians (Campus 6 [3], Spring 1995, 11).

The Commission noted that if the complaint were successful, it would set a precedent that would enable African-American groups to prevent showings of Birth of a Nation, Jewish groups to repress The Merchant of Venice, and Native Americans to prevent the screening of cowboy movies.

When Native Americans find these logos “offensive” or “insulting,” not much can be said, since these subjective terms are self-validating. But are these logos “racist”? That term should be applied to depictions that imply and promote contempt, even hatred. But the images of logos are honorific, usually connoting power, integrity, honor, and nobility.

The Ute tribe has, I think, understood this distinction. It recognized that the University of Utah, in calling its teams the “Running Utes,” was actually implementing (in a small way) the tribe and the state’s Native-American culture. So instead of campaigning against the name and logo, the tribe attempted to control them. All accouterments had to be authentic, all depictions respectful.

Some measure of just how touchy Indian activists have become is seen in the campaign to change the mascot of Fort Lewis College. The icon/mascot was not a Native American, but a White male, a mounted U. S. cavalryman carrying a sword.

Native Americans found the image offensive (CHE, 13 April 1994, 4A). In an effort to make the graphic palatable, the college first replaced the sword with a military banner (no good), then with an “FLC” pennant (not good enough), and then it removed the horseman’s rife and pistol, describing the figure now as “the Raider” (still no good). Finally it dropped the Raider entirely, replacing him with a golden eagle. The A.S.P.C.A. has not complained – yet.

While animals still seem to be a safe bet as logos and mascots, other images and symbols are sitting ducks for charges of “racism.” Any image of a White man is now automatically “racist,” the very term used to describe “Blaze,” the cartoonish Nordic warrior emblem of the University of Alabama. The logo of the University of Alabama – a White, gentlemanly, Colonel-Sanders type – was attacked as “racist” because it allegedly reminded some minority students of “plantation owners.”

Even the Minuteman mascot of the University of Massachusetts was decried as “racist” (it was also “sexist” for being male and violent for holding a gun). Said Martin Jones, the student who led the attack, “to have a White male represent a student body that is not exclusively White or male is culturally biased, and promotes racism.”

The university chancellor agreed, making the university, according to the president of the Republican Club on campus, look like a “politically correct wasteland” and the “laughingstock of the country” (CHE, 10 November 1993).

But after Jones did “some research” into the historic contributions of the Minutemen, and after the campus library was named for the founder of the NAACP (W. E. B. DuBois), he defended the image and announced his “mistake” in criticizing it. “These men, as the original liberators of America, have earned the right to be honored fully by Americans everywhere…Long live the Minutemen of Massachusetts,” (USA Today, 28 October 1994, 10A).

So far the “leprechauns” of the University of Notre Dame have escaped attack.

In these examples, images and logos are being called “racist” not so much for what they depict as for what they exclude – they don’t depict other races or ethnic groups. The Representation Police want school logos to look like Benetton ads, all cuddly rainbow inclusivity. That’s an awful lot to ask of a college logo. In “Mascot Studies,” a writer for The American Spectator (December 1993, 14) puts this foolishness into perspective:

At our universities, neither professors nor administrators apparently possess the discernment to distinguish between a harmless mascot and, say, a flaming cross on a hill…There is today on campus…an innocent assumption that any protester must have a point.

We have quite forgotten that familiar figure of the past, the malcontent. Past generations recognized these odious cranks when they commenced to bawl and took them cum grano salis. If by accident the malcontent had come upon a legitimate grievance, fine – the Republic initiated a reform and passed on.

Today the country is at the mercy of these disturbed people, and actually raises many to lifelong prominence…Worse, these grumblers have inspired thousands of common malcontents to take up a noble cause. Vexed debate over the campus mascot is but one of the unhappy consequences.

In other words, get a life.

Remove That Tattoo, That T-Shirt, and That Elihu Yale!

Official logos and mascots are not the only images on campus ‘under erasure’ for being “racist.” This section will overview a number of incidents in which harmless and relatively benign images and activities were proclaimed to be “racist” and then almost always punished. These incidents demonstrate once again just how unmoored and repressive the R-word has become on today’s college campuses. Let’s begin in the kitchen.

A dishwasher in a residence hall at Iowa State University got into hot water when students noticed he had a swastika and the letters KKK tattooed on his arms. He had neither said nor done anything “racist,” he just sported some old tatoos left over from when he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (he explained that he repudiated the organization in a letter to the student newspaper).

Still, students demanded his removal. As one of them put it, “I’m for free speech. But…the KKK is wrong and has no place in a university environment.” What’s notable is that he had worked at the university for eighteen years before anybody noticed, or bothered to complain (U. Magazine, February 1994, 10). The university was warned by the state not to fire him.

Now to the infamous “racist” T-shirt at the University of California (Riverside). In 1993, Phi Kappa Sigma advertised its South of the Border Fiesta with a T-shirt featuring a figure in a serape and sombrero sitting on a beach looking at the setting sun and holding a bottle of tequila.

Next to the figure was a set of steel drums and a wooden Tiki head, in which was carved the word “Jamaica.” The lower half of the shirt shows a Rastafarian standing in the doorway of a Mexican cantina with a big smile and a six-pack of brew. This graphic was wrapped in a lyric from Bob Marley: “It doesn’t matter where you come from long as you know where you are going.” The shirt, according to the fraternity, was meant to show the ‘inclusivity’ of booze and partying down.

But campus Hispanic organizations charged the fraternity with “offensive racial stereotypes” and filed a formal complaint. Although the fraternity president, Rich Carrez, apologized to the campus Hispanic organization, the apology did no good. The fraternity was accused of being “racist,” even though it was the most racially diverse fraternity on campus (22 of its 47 members were non-White).

Carrez himself is part Native American, while the fraternity’s Vice President is Latino, and the student who designed the T-shirt is Hispanic. When this was pointed out, the Hispanic organization merely replied, “You should have known better.”

After a series of hearings, in which the fraternity was accused of launching a “racist” attack on the Latino community, the fraternity was forced to destroy all of the offending T-shirts, to write a letter of apology, to do 16 hours of community service, and to attend two sensitivity seminars on multiculturalism. But Hispanic students were still not satisfied, so the fraternity was also barred from intramural sports and rush activities, stripped of its charter and kicked off campus.

When the fraternity’s cause was taken up by the Individual Rights Foundation, the university settled out of court, agreeing to reinstate the fraternity, to drop all charges against it, and, in an unprecedented concession, to require two administrators to undergo sensitivity training in the First Amendment (see “Counter Coup: When Sensitivity Training is a Good Thing,” Heterodoxy 2 [3], November 1993, 12; “Campus Speech Codes Are Being Shot Down as Opponents Pipe Up,” WSJ, 22 December 1993, A1).

A similar graphic landed a student cartoonist at Portland State University in the gazpacho. In trying to point out that the American Free Trade Agreement was good for corporate America but not for the average Mexican citizen, the student drew a Mexican staring longingly at a display of beans, wondering if he could afford them. One would think that this would be received sympathetically by Hispanic students, but it wasn’t. All they saw in the cartoon was an implicit epithet: ‘beaner.’

The Chronicle of Higher Education sided with the thin-skinned students outraged by this scene, chiding the editors – “none of whom are Hispanic” – for not realizing that the depiction of beans could be construed as a “slur” (CHE, 17 November 1993, A39).

This spring, students at Yale demanded that the university remove a portrait of its founder, Elihu Yale, from its boardroom because it is “racist.” The painting portrays the school’s eighteenth-century founder seated in a chair with a young Black male (some think an Indian servant), perhaps kneeling, handing him a letter (CHE, 28 April 1995, A6).

Not nearly as exciting as the “Hovey murals” at Dartmouth, which feature drunken, scantily clad Native Americans, and which have been covered with panels since the 1970s because of protests that they were ”racist” (USA Today, 18 October 1993, D1).

At the University of Oregon, a banner depicting the faces of Michelangelo, Plato, Jane Austen, and eight other renowned, but White, figures was torn down by a group of students, who scrawled “racism” on it and painted some of the faces brown (CHE, 27 May 1992, A2).

What they did not realize, apparently, was that painting White faces brown was itself gravely “racist.” That was established in 1988, when a White Stanford student, to make a point, colored the face of Beethoven brown. The incident took place at Ujamaa House, Stanford’s “African-theme” dormitory.

One evening, a Black student claimed that Beethoven was Black. Several White students thought not. One of them found a big picture of Beethoven and, using a crayon, gave the composer an Afro and Black features and hung the poster outside the Black student’s room. When the Black student saw it, he was “flabbergasted,” and another was “outraged and sickened,” condemning the poster as “hateful, shocking.”

The White student explained that he did it only because disliked what he called “ethnic aggressivity,” and the campus obsession with race. He was also upset by a Black student who insisted that she would never marry anyone but another Black (a “racist” comment?). So he defaced the Beethoven poster “to show the Black students how ridiculous it was to focus on race.” He said the poster was “satirical humor.”

Threatened by members of an exceedingly hostile crowd of outraged Blacks, the White student apologized, but to no avail. Two days later, all the White students in Ujamaa – about 60 – found anonymous notes under their doors telling them to move out. In the photo display of the freshmen in Ujamaa, all the White faces had holes punched in them. Soon signs appeared that read: “Avenge Ujamaa. Smash the honkie oppressors!” (Chronicles, January 1990, 51-53).

And don’t even think about painting your own face Black! If you think Ted Danson got into trouble for his Friars Club routine, try it on campus. A number of frat boys have, and have been swatted with suspensions and hefty fines. No matter what the intent or context, painting your face Black is always a “racist” act, even when no Black person is present to be offended. The only problem is, that punishing people who do this is unconstitutional, even on campus, as a federal judge ruled in a case involving George Mason University (CHE, 4 September 1991).

At Brown, an art professor had to cancel a long-planned screening of the classic film Birth of a Nation when the local branch of the NAACP denounced it as “racist” (Commentary, September 1989, 22).

At Harvard, a government professor was forced to cancel a showing of It’s a Wonderful Life when Black students protested that its depiction of the household maid, which was both dignified and accurate, was a “racist” stereotype (D’Souza, Illiberal Education, 217).

At the University of Pittsburgh, a professor of public relations scrapped the showing of a Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, when some Jews called it “racist” and “anti-Semitic,” which it is. But it was to be shown to instruct students about how the mass media could be misused (CHE, 13 November 1991). The logic that prevailed in these cases would forever cut us off from the past to avoid discomfiting the most thin-skinned.

Classroom movies aren’t the only thing that can provoke a charge of “racism.” In 1994, a French professor of psychology was roundly attacked as a “racist” for asking students taking a final exam to give the “clinical reasons” why the majority of Jews saw deportation between 1939 and 1942 as their “inexorable fate” (Chicago Tribune, 28 June 1994, 10).

This year a physics professor at MIT also got into trouble for an exam question: “You are in the forefront of a civil-rights demonstration when the police decide to disperse the crowd using a water cannon. If the cannon they turn on you delivers 1,000 liters of water per minute, what force does the water exert on you?”

After apologizing in print, the teacher explained that the question was intended to make physics come alive and to honor the courage of activists. A Black student responded that the question revealed how badly all faculty members needed sensitivity training (CHE, 3 March 1995, A33).

Another professor was called a “racist” for reading aloud in class from Moral Panic, 230). Apparently, David Mamet’s Oleanna is not an exaggeration.

In the censorious climate that prevails today on many campuses, even statements that are supported by observation, common sense, or statistics can be tagged as “racist.” A candidate for a university presidency did not get the job when it was learned that he had once said, perhaps after watching the Tom Brokaw special on “Black Athletes–Fact and Fiction” (1989), that “a Black athlete can actually out-jump a White athlete.” This occurred just before a movie enshrined this truism in its title (White Men Can’t Jump).

As Jared Taylor remarks, “Whites are not supposed to speculate about a possible Black superiority in athletics because to do so could be construed as a suggestion that Blacks may also have a natural inferiority in other areas. The tennis champion Arthur Ashe, however, is allowed to think Blacks may be specially talented at running because he, himself, is Black,” (222).

At Harvard, a memo distributed to students by the instructor was claimed to have created a hostile environment because it reported scholarly findings on negotiating styles that grouped Blacks and women as “low risk-takers.” A Black student said, “Just on the face of it, the memo is offensive,” (The Wall Street Journal, 30 October 1992, B1).

The prevailing assumption is that any generalization – favorable or unfavorable – about any minority that someone does not like is by definition “racist” and deserves to be suppressed – as long as it is said by a White person. Minority diversity consultants, in contrast, can parade, without a shred of empirical evidence, the grossest racial and ethnic stereotypes with virtual impunity.

Even statements about matters that are not directly racial are likely to be denounced as “racist” when they conflict with reigning groupthink. When Yale College dean Donald Kagan urged a group of freshmen to study Western Civilization, arguing that the freedom and civil liberties enjoyed by the West have led to a tolerance and a respect for diversity unknown in most cultures, the student newspaper denounced him as “racist, sexist, and out of touch,” (Campus Report, July/August 1993, 5).

In 1993, students at Cornell managed to free the epithet “racist” from all objective constraints. Someone spray-painted graffiti over an exhibition of art by Hispanic students. Although the graffiti contained not one “racist” slur, the students charged that the act was “racist” anyhow (CHE, 1 December 1993, A4). In short, even what is not “racist” is “racist.”

This perverse logic also governed the handling of a celebrated incident at Bowdoin College involving four fun-loving Asian students. What these students did was to dress themselves in White togas, wear bandannas around their heads, and march around the quad playing mandolins and harmonicas, holding candles and chanting, and throwing Toastee-Os breakfast cereal.

Incredibly, some students alleged that this was a “racist” demonstration. Because the togas were predominantly, but not exclusively, White, these students claimed that this was like having the Ku Klux Klan parading around campus – that they were, you guessed it, “intimidated” and “offended.”

While the Dean of Students conceded that these four festive Asians did not purposely set out to intimidate or offend anyone, nevertheless, the groups was charged with the Orwellian offence of being “grossly insensitive to the implications of their actions.”

The frolicsome foursome had letters of reprimand placed in their files, were forced to write an apology, to hear multicultural lectures on “issues involving racial sensitivities,” and to create an educational program on the conflict of freedom of expression with multicultural sensitivities (Campus, Winter 1992). Who better to speak from experience about the results of such conflicts?

Since anything can now be attacked as “racist,” it should not be surprising that this epithet has been hurled even at posters and exhibitions meant to combat racism. At Pennsylvania State University, a well-intentioned poster that listed almost fifty offensive slurs (“There’s a nasty name for everyone. Including you. Think about it.”) was itself attacked as “racist” (Campus, Fall 1991).

The same fate befell an art exhibit at Passaic County Community College attacking racism by depicting the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis and the epithets they hurl. The administration removed the paintings from a campus gallery when some students complained that they were “racist” (CHE, 8 December 1993, A6).

An exhibition at Johns Hopkins meant to honor the abolitionist movement unintentionally committed a ‘hate crime’ when it included material on James and William Birney, White abolitionists who released their slaves to demonstrate their anti-slavery commitment.

Blacks would have none of this sly “racist” endorsement of slavery. “This stuff will not be tolerated,” said Paul Brown, one of the Black students who staged a sit-in. “There are plenty of resources in the library if you just made a half-ass attempt to find something.” The library director who failed to make the half-assed attempt did manage the obligatory abject apology: “Personally, I deeply regret any offense given by the exhibit of abolitionist material,” (Heterodoxy, March 1993, 3).

This incident brings to mind the notorious attack on Jeanne Cannizzo, the University of Toronto anthropologist who curated the Royal Ontario Museum exhibit “Into the Heart of Africa” (1990), a well-meaning indictment of the humiliating way in which colonialists treated Africans.

Although no Whites protested this “insensitive” presentation of their forebears, some Blacks denounced the portrayals of vanquished African warriors as “racist.” According to this logic, any depiction of the victims of oppression must be “racist.” The protesters advised the museum that it should have exhibited only works of great African art.

Protesters mounted demonstrations not only outside the museum, but they invaded Cannizzo’s classroom, hurling insults and epithets at her. On one occasion, according to an eye-witness, “a large Black male chased Cannizzo down the hall.” Administrators and faculty did nothing to stop the defamation and assaults, abjectly afraid to oppose the will or criticize the behavior of campus minorities (“The Silencers,” Maclean’s, 27 May 1991, 63).

Cannizzo, shattered by this experience, left the university and eventually emigrated to England. All this, for organizing an exhibition that attacked racism!

This section ends where it began, in the kitchen. A group of dining-hall workers at Harvard wanted to have a “Back to the Fifties” party. But the Minority Affairs Dean denounced them for being “racist,” arguing that it was wrong to feel nostalgia for a decade that included segregationist sentiments (D’Souza, Illiberal Education, 217; Newsweek , 6 May 1991).

A far more notorious incident occurred at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where the swampy multicultural atmosphere that now chokes ‘cutting-edge’ campuses led to a menu being found “racist.”

Two semi-autonomous colleges on the campus share a kitchen. Merrill College caters to ‘multicultural’ students; Crown appeals to science and economics students, many of whom are Asians. The incident began innocuously enough with the Crown kitchen staff deciding what to serve at a monthly College Night dinner.

Weeks earlier Merrill had chosen an Asian theme, but a Crown staffer, a Japanese-American, noticed that the dinner happened to fall on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Thinking this might appear to be by design and be misinterpreted, she chose a non-ethnic menu instead. While Crown students munched on chicken and spare ribs, a rumor spread at Merrill College that Crown had refused to serve Asian food because it blamed Asians for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Soon fliers littered the campus denouncing the Crown administration as “racist.” Crown staff members were besieged by groups of angry students, angry phone calls, and even death threats. Meanwhile at Merrill, students and faculty, gloating at the troubles of their colleagues, issued a public statement about Crown’s “overt and covert racism” and calling the decision – keep in mind that it was made by a Japanese-American – ”the racist unconscious at work.”

After months of turmoil, the staff at Crown was forced to attend sensitivity workshops, which Crown’s provost, Peggy Musgrave, described as “brainwashing perations…humiliating experiences where people have to bare their souls and expose their innermost thoughts.” Musgrave was forced to resign. Crown’s bursar was so distraught and exhausted by the controversy that he was forced to take extended medical leave. Other Crown staff resigned.

All this bloodletting began, remember, over an allegedly “racist” menu (see Barbara Rhoades Ellis, “A Day of Infamy at UC Santa Cruz,” Heterodoxy 1 [3] June 1992, 6).

Muzzling the “Racist” Student Press

Unmoored charges of “racism” have sanctioned far more serious and repressive attacks on free expression and debate than the ones mentioned so far. The epithet “racist” has been used with particular effectiveness to intimidate and silence the student press. According to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, during the academic year 1992-93 there were 38 “major trashings of publications” on campus.

At the University of Maryland, students stole 10,000 copies of the Diamondback, alleging that it is “racist” for misspelling the title of W. E. B. DuBois’s book The Souls of Black Folk (which came out The Sales of Black Folk; CHE 17 November 1993, A39). Most often, the accusation of “racism” is invoked to discredit opinions that minority members find uncongenial or embarrassing.

At Duke, the Duke Review was denounced as “racist” and summarily trashed by a Black student because it dared to criticize the Black Student Alliance as wasteful and monolithic (Campus 5 [2], Winter 1994, 13; 5 [3], Spring 1994, 12).

At the University of Iowa, Black students “filled the offices”– as the Chronicle of Higher Education euphemistically put it – of The Daily Iowan to protest the publication of a political cartoon comparing the Blacks who almost killed Reginald Denny to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Apparently the White editors had not heard that Blacks cannot be “racists” – by definition.

At the University of South Carolina, the student newspaper was threatened with a funding review by administrators when it published a student’s poem satirizing then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson (Illiberal Education, 145).

At Virginia Commonwealth University, Black students stole the entire press run of the student newspaper to punish it for running “racist” editorials charging that Black student groups receive disproportionate funding from the school: “We find you guily [sic] of several counts of vandalist, slanderist, racist, scandalist journalism. Therefore we are shutting you down.” The Black student newspaper complimented the thieves for “staging a courageous and peaceful protest,” (Campus Report, 10 [3], April 1995).

At Vassar, the student newspaper was called “racist” after it proclaimed Black activist Anthony Grate “hypocrite of the month” for espousing anti-Semitic views while denouncing bigotry against Blacks. The newspaper quoted Grate as saying “dirty Jews” and “I hate Jews.”

When the Spectator publicized the hypocrisy and racism of this Black leader, the Vassar Student Association attempted to suppress the offending issue, and then, when that failed, withdrew its funding. The newspaper had to be punished, according to VSA, for “unnecessarily jeopardiz[ing] an educational community based on mutual understanding,” (D’Souza, Ibid. 10).

On most campuses, it is presumptively “racist” to point out minority “racism.” The editor of the student newspaper at the State University of New York at Stony Brook provoked a tirade of abuse when he wrote that his experiences on this multicultural campus had “taught me to be wary, distrustful, and, at times, downright revolted by African Americans.”

In a column, Stony Brook Teaches Reactive Racism , the student wrote: “In one particular Africana Studies class I was called a ‘kike’ by one Black student, while another yelled out, ‘You! You Jew. You raped my people!’” The student, who is Jewish, said that other White students had told him that they also had been victims of racism by members of minority groups.

After the column was published, Black students didn’t apologize, as so many White students have been coerced into doing, but engineered a boycott against businesses that advertised in the paper. Although the student editor was physically threatened, the president of this “inclusive community” did not denounce Black racism or even investigate the charges – he denounced the column (CHE, 9 March 1994, A33).

At the University of California-Riverside, it is unhealthy even to criticize gangsta rap! The trouble for Mark Hardie, a Black 22-year-old senior, began when he wrote two columns in the student paper, one denouncing ‘gangsta rap’ and the other calling Afrocentrism a “racist” concept. Hardie was forced to resign his position as a staff writer and columnist because retaliation was promised if he stayed on.

Police had to provide Hardie with security escorts on campus because Black students threatened to kill him. One caller to a campus radio program said: “Ya know, he’s a victim here, he’s gonna be a victim. I’m waiting outside. I’m gonna kill him. I swear to God I’m gonna kill his family,” (Campus Reports 9 [4], April 1994, 3).

At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Black students occupied the offices of, and temporarily closed down, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian when the White staff replaced three minority editors (others still served). Another grievance was that the paper refused to run an editorial condemning the first verdict in the Rodney King case. During the attack on the office, demonstrators broke a plate glass window and a stereo, and ripped up files, photographs, and documents.

When the student editor criticized the demonstrators in the Boston Globe, one Black student protester invaded the student-newspaper office armed with a baseball bat and attacked the newspaper’s photo editor, dragging him out of The Collegian office to the main floor of the Campus Center (CHE, 14 October 1992).

To also show their displeasure, the protesters confiscated or trashed most of the 19,000 copies of the press run. Although the theft of the papers was arguably a crime and certainly a violation of First Amendment rights, the administration refused to condemn, or even comment on, this act.

Throughout the controversy, the administration, as Gary Brasor points out, tacitly approved unlawful acts it deemed compatible with its multicultural agenda (for a blow-by-blow account, see Gary Crosby Brasor, “Weimar in Amherst,” Academic Questions, 8 [2], Spring 1995, 69-89).

At DePaul University, the DePaulia was recently denounced as “racist” and shut down by Black students who didn’t like the DePaulia correctly reporting that several DePaul students arrested for fighting at a campus “Bootie-Call” party were Black. In the story, the DePaulia quoted the police report, which described those arrested as “M/Bs,” police shorthand for male/Blacks and one of several routine abbreviations used by police to describe people either arrested or victimized.

According to the protesters, however, the abbreviation is “offensive” (Chicago Sun-Times, 12 April 1995, 11). Their leader said that the mention of race was “disrespectful” and contributed to negative stereotyping of Blacks on campus (Chicago Sun-Times, 11 April 1995, 13). In other words, quoting directly, quoting accurately, and having the facts straight are now “racist” if the truth discomfits minorities.

Predictably, DePaulia staffers will receive counseling about “cultural sensitivity” but the Black protesters will not receive tutoring in the First Amendment. And, of course, no reprimands for those who trashed the office and shut down the paper.

Perhaps the most outrageous attacks on a student paper occurred in 1993 at the University of Pennsylvania during the tenure of Sheldon Hackney, the Poster Boy of Invertebrate Administrators.

Gregory Pavlik, a politically incorrect columnist for The Daily Pennsylvanian, had criticized Martin Luther King for being a plagiarist and adulterer, Malcolm X for being a pimp, and racial preferences for being “racist.”

Pavlik wrote a column in March of 1993 that criticized university officials for expelling two White freshmen who dumped water on Black members of the Onyx Senior Honor Society who were holding an initiation/hazing ceremony under their dormitory windows at 2:30 a.m. (Maybe Penn’s code should tell students when to go to bed.)

Pavlik provocatively claimed that the two students were suspended because they were White, and that the Onyx Society was the real culprit and should be punished, even though Black.

The column ignited a firestorm. The university’s Judicial Action Office filed 32 charges of “racial harassment” against Pavlik, despite the fact that the newspaper is financially and legally independent of the university. In the most wonderful doublespeak, the Judicial Action Officer said she filed the complaint because she was “afraid for [Pavlik’s] safety” (Campus Report, 8 [5], May 1993, 4).

To protest the “blatant and voluntary perpetuation of institutional racism” at the newspaper and on campus, a number of Black students removed nearly all 14,000 copies of one edition from campus distribution sites (CHE, 28 April 1993, A33). 202 Penn Blacks signed a letter justifying the act.

A university report on this incident found that the theft of the newspapers was a “form of student protest and not an indicator of criminal behavior,” and that the campus police who arrested demonstrators caught in the act were wrong (see excerpts in WSJ, 26 July 1993, A10, and editorial). They should have contacted “Open Expression Monitors” to study the students actions (I am not making this up).

The police were sent to sensitivity training seminars to have their sense of fair play adjusted. The chief of security for a campus museum, who nabbed two protesters sneaking out with plastic garbage bags, was officially reprimanded for “racial harassment” and suspended. He too had to undergo sensitivity training. The Black students who threw away the entire press run of the newspaper were not punished (see “Penn Report Faults Campus Police for Response to Students’ Taking Papers,” CHE, 4 August 1993, A27, and 22 September 1993, A35).

In July 1988 – before many of these incidents had occurred – Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, issued a prescient statement:

We are extremely concerned about incidents…which we believe reflect a growing wave of campus censorship inflicted under the guise of fighting racism. Faced with a real concern about an important issue, universities appear to be accepting the misguided notion that viewpoint suppression is an appropriate means to their end.

We note with some irony that this same means was used a generation ago against students who were advocating equality and desegregation (in Illiberal Education, 145).

Suppressing Debate about Public Issues

As the previous section makes clear, the term “racism” has been used on campus to squelch debate about a number of crucial social issues. The term has proven particularly effective in silencing debate about racial preferences. “On virtually every campus,” writes Dinesh D’Souza, “there is a de facto taboo against free discussion of affirmative action or minority self-segregation, and efforts to open such discussion are considered presumptively racist,” (Illiberal Education , 238).

Jennifer Imle, a junior at Southwestern University in Texas, displayed in her room a poster attacking admissions policies based on race. She was soon attacked as a “racist” and ridiculed by her professors during class. The Dean of Students took one look at the poster and said “This must go!” circulating a memo that said the poster smacked of White supremacy.

Imle resisted the effort to suspend her First Amendment rights, and arranged to have Dinesh D’Souza and a campus advocate of racial preferences debate the issue before 350 students eager to hear the issue publicly and honestly discussed.

Other stories don’t have such happy outcomes. At one major university, an associate dean was asked to resign because of his candid opposition to affirmative action and multiculturalism (Lingua Franca, April 1991, 37). At another, an assistant vice chancellor of academic personnel was fired, and escorted by police from her office, when she pointed out that a new affirmative-action plan violated the university’s stringent guidelines for faculty search procedures Heterodoxy 2 [10], October 1993).

At Harvard, a professor got into trouble merely for defining affirmative action as “government enforcement of preferential treatment in hiring, promotion, and college admissions.” Black students denounced the phrase “preferential treatment” as “racist” (D’Souza, Illiberal Education, 199-200).

In 1987, at UCLA, a student editor was suspended for printing a cartoon ridiculing affirmative action. In the “intolerably racist” cartoon, a student stops a rooster on campus and asks how it got into UCLA. The rooster responds, “Affirmative action.” When another editor at a different school wrote a column criticizing UCLA officials for suspending the editor – and reproduced the cartoon to support his argument – he too was suspended.

The newspaper’s adviser, an assistant professor of journalism no less, said that his crime was publishing controversial material “without permission.” Incredibly, other editors agreed with her, clucking that the student journalist had learned “a valuable lesson in common sense,” (Dictatorship of Virtue, 209).

As John Leo put it, “Whenever the curtain parts and the public gets a peek at what is really going on in college admissions…voices are raised to expel the student who released the data, as well as the college editor who printed them. This kind of defense of furtiveness is routine,” (“Endgame for affirmative action,” U. S. News and World Report, 13 March 1995, 18).

The most outrageous example of denouncing a critic of affirmative action as a ”racist” involved Timothy Maguire, a law senior at Georgetown University Law School. After working as a clerk in the admissions office, Maguire wrote an article reporting that Georgetown admits Blacks with lower LSAT scores than Whites (a routine practice throughout the country).

The article provoked outrage, with one White student characterizing it as “assaultive.” “People were injured. I think that kind of speech is outrageous,” (in Hentoff, Free Speech for Me, 219). Black students accused Maguire of being a “racist” and demanded his expulsion (CHE, 29 May 1991).

When the law school prosecuted Maguire for revealing “confidential” admissions data (he named no names), lawyers refused to defend him out of fear of being called “racists” (Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions, 1992, 181). The two who did were not only accused of being “racists” but placed on probation at the D. C. School of Law (Hentoff, 223-27).

Clearly, the safest way to express opinions about affirmative action on campus is anonymously, on the internet. At Yale recently, a posting contended that affirmative action should play no part in the selection of editors for The Yale Law Review, and defended using anonymity because “self-identification could lead to personal harm.” The law school dean determined that this posting had to go (CHE, 7 April 1995, A36).

Strategic interventions of the word “racist” have discouraged debate on other crucial issues as well. The University of Charleston refused to renew the contract of a conservative scholar after he criticized “diversity” standards for accreditation (National Review, 1 February 1993, 14).

At the University of Oregon, faculty members who had raised questions about a proposal to increase the number of required multicultural credits were called “racists” in a full-page ad published in an alternative campus newspaper. The ad listed the professors’ names, class schedules, and office telephone numbers (CHE 30 June 1993, A27).

Diane Ravitch was called a “racist” for criticizing “racial fundamentalism,” the notion that children can learn only from people of the same race. She has also been physically threatened: “‘We’re going to get you, bitch. We’re going to beat your White ass,’” (New York Magazine , 21 January 1991).

At the University of New Mexico, the contract of a part-time instructor was not renewed after she was charged with “racism” by a Hispanic graduate student for saying in class that “there are six generations of South Valley residents who cannot speak English. There’s no excuse for that since they have many opportunities to learn. There’s just no excuse for that if they want to stay in this country, and if that’s the case, as far as I’m concerned, they can go further south.”

Although the professor denied saying these words, no formal hearing was ever held, and she was not interviewed before she was released (NAS Update, 4 [1]).

At Chico State University, a professor got into hot water when he published a letter in the local newspaper arguing that demands for Indian teachers were unrealistic because there were not enough qualified candidates. He went on to say that Indian students ought to be on campus “to get the best education…not have their sensibilities stroked and grades of ‘A’ doled out on the basis of their race or correct politics.”

Native Americans across the country attacked these comments, and the Chico administration informed the professor that he had violated the school’s racial harassment policy, which calls for expulsion of faculty or students who create “an atmosphere of intimidation and hostility.” When the professor threatened to sue, the university dropped its charges (Heterodoxy 2 [4], December 1993, 3).

A similar incident occurred at the University of Alaska, when a Harvard-trained expert on Native American education was charged with “racism” and “discrimination” for saying that a teacher-education program at the university was under “equity pressures” to pass Alaskan Natives through the system.

Angry faculty and students organized demonstrations against her, and the Fairbanks Native Association filed a complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The OCR eventually determined that the professor’s remarks did not violate the rights of students (CHE, 23 September 1992; see also Steven Wulf, “Federal Guidelines for Censorship,” Academic Questions, 8 [2], Spring 1995, 58-68).

To avoid being stigmatized as a “racist,” it is best not to say anything that might disturb a minority member.

At Iowa State University, a White African-American history professor disagreed with a Black student about the role of Afrocentric theories in the course; the student, a member of the Nation of Islam, called her a “racist liar” and threatened her with a “jihad” (CHE, 20 October 1993, A5; 1 December).

At the University of Illinois a feminist scholar was removed from her course in women’s studies when she said of one Black student who “snickered” and trivialized rape that he fit the profile of a Black male rapist – a remark he found “racist.” She, of course, condemned the university for being “sexist,” (CHE, 7 October 1992).

At the University of Michigan, a White professor of sociology and the nation’s leading expert on the demography of Black Americans was denounced as a “racist” after he read a passage from the Autobiography of Malcolm X in which the author describes himself as a pimp and a thief. Black students called for a person of color to teach the course (and perhaps to re-write the Autobiography).

The professor stopped teaching the class and observed that several of his colleagues intended to drop any discussion of various important race-related issues from their courses, for fear of being accused of “racism” (Chester Finn, “The Campus: An Island of Repression is a Sea of Freedom,” Commentary, September 1989, 19).

One of the most notorious instances of intimidation was directed at two eminent, and exceedingly liberal, Harvard professors who co-taught a course on American history and demography. In 1987, both were attacked in the Harvard Crimson for being “racially insensitive.”

Bernard Bailyn’s crime was reading an exculpatory passage about slavery from the diary of a southern planter without giving equal time to the recollections of a slave.

Richard Thernstrom’s crime was assigning a book that defined affirmative action as “the government enforcement of preferential treatment in hiring, promotion and college admissions,” and endorsing Patrick Moynihan’s thesis that the breakup of the Black family is an important cause of persistent Black poverty (John Taylor, New York Magazine, 21 January 1991, 33-34).

As a Black student put it, “I am also left to question his sensitivity when I hear that Black men get feelings of inadequacy, beat their wives, and take off” (in Illiberal Education , 195-96). Thernstrom’s defense, that he “presented factual information in an objective and dispassionate way,” is beside the point; the facts hurt the feelings of Black students, and that, by definition, proves “racial insensitivity.” Thernstrom wrote:

Teaching in a university in which a handful of disaffected students can all too easily launch a smear campaign…one must think about how many times one wants to be a martyr. I love to debate historical interpretations, but what I experienced…was not public discussion of the validity of my ideas but an indictment of my character and motives. I am not alone in deciding to avoid yet another irrational and vicious personal attack like this…

I know of other scholars who have censored their courses by dropping any treatment of touchy topics such as the disintegration of the Black family. When I was an undergraduate in the 1950s, the menace to academic freedom in America came from the right.

Academic freedom is again under attack today, this time from leftist students…who believe in “no free speech for fascists” and think mistakenly that all the fascists are on the right ( Harper’s, February 1992, “Letters”).

Given this repressive climate on campus, it is now dangerous even to report widely accepted facts, if those facts are unwelcomed by, or embarrassing to, minorities and their protectors. At the University of Michigan, a professor of statistics (for 37 years) was accused of “promoting racism” and temporarily suspended after he noted in class that minorities average 55 points lower on the SAT than Whites (Campus 5 [2], Winter 1994, 12).

As Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer points out, “We have to deal with some very bad news when we talk about Blacks…We have to talk about unpleasant matters, matters that Blacks will find upsetting and depressing, and that can only make them unhappy.” If universities choose to have a curriculum that includes African-American Studies and courses on race, then universities, as Dinesh D’Souza argues, have a responsibility to make sure that professors and students are free to talk about these issues without intimidation (Illiberal Education, 201).

Suppressing “Racist” Research

The effort to discourage and suppress ’social risk’ research has a long and ignoble history (recall Bruno and Galileo). During the 1960s and early 70s, this urge took on a ‘humanitarian’ guise. The goal was to protect minorities from “racist” research that might harm the interests or psyches of minorities.

Why is it “ignoble” to suppress allegedly “racist” research? Jonathan Rauch provides an elegant answer in Kindly Inquisitors (1993). Rauch argues that the only way that liberal science can effectively work to find truth and establish consensus is to presume that any and all subjects are open to competent investigation.

To do otherwise would require authoritarian control of vast proportions, and countries that have tried to exert such control have suffered grievous social, political and economic deprivations as a result. The knowledge-making enterprise itself, with its checks and balances, is the only agent that can fittingly determine who and what is competent and when a case has been “proved.”

Liberal science, according to Rauch, “declares that the issue of race and intelligence should be explored by any researcher who cares to explore it and who will follow the rules,” (144). Whatever one thinks about this research, amateurs must leave it to experts and the processes of free intellectual debate to determine if and when it can be added to our body of knowledge.

Research that cannot withstand the vigorous fact-checking and error-finding that drives our knowledge-making enterprise will eventually be discredited and marginalized. Research that can withstand such scrutiny will be incorporated into the mass of data, findings, theories, etc. that we call knowledge. Once there, other agencies and forums can debate and deal with its political and social implications.

This crucial processes of testing can only occur, obviously, on research that has already been done and made public. To prevent research from being done, no matter how risky it may seem at the time or to some members of society, could rob society of potentially useful insights, and would likely, in the long run, lead to the undermining of the most successful and beneficial collaborative and international enterprise in the history of humanity.

Let me illustrate the truth of this observation. Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan broke the silence on the problems facing Black culture with his book, The Black Family: The Case for National Action. Noting a sharp rise in the number of single-parent Black families, he forewarned that this trend posed a threat to Blacks’ social progress and to society at large.

For his efforts, he was vilified for “blaming the victim” and accused of “crypto-racism” (Joseph G. Conti and Brad Stetson, “The New Black Vanguard,” Intercollegiate Review , Spring 1993, 34). But as Adam Walinsky has recently pointed out, Moynihan’s dire predictions have come true; vilifying his “racist” research only served to blind people to the “long descending night” of violence which he foresaw and which is now upon us (“The Crisis of Public Order,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1995, 48-49).

As Rauch has shown, humanitarians continue to attack scientific and social research that threatens to lead to findings that some minorities, and indeed some Whites, might find disturbing, especially if true. At the University of Michigan, for example, an administrator called for the suppression of “theories” that might conflict with a multicultural agenda, since “harassment in classrooms is based on theories held by teachers,” (Kindly Inquisitors, 136).

The notion that some credible scientific theories and findings are, in and of themselves, “racist” has spread to undergraduates, with dangerous implications for academic freedom. “An amazing 38 percent” of students evaluating a teacher’s lecture on the genetic contribution to intelligence felt that this was not an appropriate topic for a psychology course.

When these students were asked about the professor’s motives for presenting this material, “24 percent specifically mentioned ‘racist,’ ‘racism,’ or notions of ‘racial superiority’” (Stanley Coren, “When Teaching Is Evaluated on Political Grounds,” Academic Questions , Summer 1993, 77; reprinted in The Montana Professor, 5 [1], Winter 1995, 12-14). Clearly, scholars working on touchy subjects – and the list of these keeps growing and growing too – run their own risk of being label “racists,” no matter how valid their findings.

At the University of California-Berkeley, a professor of physical anthropology who argues that crime, intelligence, and other human behaviors are influenced by genetic factors and that there is a relationship between race and innate abilities, was prevented from teaching his class when 75 students marched into his anthropology class and drowned out his lecture (CHE, 4 March 1992; Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom, 137).

Trouble befell a similar course taught at the University of Denver. Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, who studies the relation between race and IQ and how intelligence traits can be inherited and measured, was to lecture for half the course on intelligence and public policy with the other half reserved for his critics.

Not good enough. His critics at DU think his “racist” ideas were not worthy of any discussion and demanded that the course be canceled (Campus Report, June 1991; CHE, 16 January 1991). Fortunately for academic freedom, the university disagreed.

At the University of Maryland, a “thoughtfully organized” conference on genetic components in criminal behavior, which reviewers said did “a superb job of assessing the underlying scientific, legal, ethical, and public policy issues,” was canceled by the National Institutes of Health when Blacks said it would promote “racism.” The Committee to Stop the Violence Initiative, formed at Howard University, said of the conference, “It is clear racism. It is an effort to use public money for a genocidal effort against African Americans,” (CHE, 2 September 1992).

At the University of Delaware, two researchers were prevented from accepting funds from a private foundation some administrators deemed “racist.” The campus African-American Coalition claimed that the research threatened “the very survival of African-Americans,” (Campus Report, May 1992). An arbitrator, saying that the university based its decision on perceptions rather than on facts, overturned the ban (CHE, 4 September 1991).

Both researchers had already endured years of institutional harassment and character assassination for publishing the results of their research on race-norming (As a result of this work, race-norming was banned in 1991). After the Department of Educational Studies denied major credits for their courses and defined their publications and investigations as “non-research,” they filed a federal lawsuit to gain relief from the persecution and won an out-of-court settlement in 1992 (Campus Report 9 [2] February 1994, 6).

This humanitarian effort to restrict “racist” research can wind up inhibiting research by Blacks that could help the Black community! At the University of Chicago, a Black sociologist encountered all kinds of opposition to his research on racial integration, especially when he found that Black schoolteachers were less prepared than their White counterparts (Lingua Franca, April 1991, 37; CHE , 21 November 1990).

Other Blacks at the same school have also complained about the pressures they face to avoid research that might reflect badly on Blacks or bring unwelcome news. Professor William Julius Wilson observed, “There has been a tendency in our field not to discuss issues that are unflattering,” (CHE, 30 October 1991).

Personally, I very uncomfortable with the theories of Philippe Rushton and Michael Levin, who argue, as I understand them, that on average Blacks score lower than Whites and Asians on intelligence and most other tests, and that these results may have something to do with genetic endowment (see Jared Taylor, Paved with Good Intentions, 123-182 for an overview of comparative test results in many fields).

I am also offended by the notion that Whites may be, on average, less intelligent than Asians, or that, as Leonard Jeffries incredibly argues (he is not a researcher), Whites, as “ice people,” are not as nice as Blacks, who are “sun people.”

I, like many others, worry about how any of this information may affect immediate human behavior and long-term social policy. But I first want to know if it is true, as truth is consensually defined by the experts in the appropriate fields. If it is not true, then I can dismiss it as I dismiss horoscopes no matter how flattering. If it is true, then we have to determine how this information bears upon the way we live together.

We must allow social-risk research to be done because we cannot know beforehand if the risks will materialize or not, or if the research will benefit some of us in unexpected ways. After all, most knowledge entails social “risks” for some group or other. The only way to avoid such risks would be to profoundly curtail through authoritarian fiat the knowledge-making enterprise of Western civilization. This program of repression, however, would entail the gravest risks of all.

Conclusion

I have tried to show that the epithet “racist” is often used irresponsibly to punish and suppress a wide range of words, images, statements and findings – from innocuous metaphors to unwelcome facts and theories. I am not arguing, of course, that the term “racist” is only or always used this way, but I do contend that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish legitimate uses of the term from exaggerated, promiscuous, and repressive ones.

It is time for responsible students, academics, and administrators to discountenance all heedless, negligent, and intolerant invocations of this word. The use of repressive and stigmatizing epithets has no place in a community of fact-gatherers, truth-sorters, knowledge-makers, and opinion-shapers.

How did campuses get into this fix? Why do so many students, teachers and administrators make, or treat seriously, patently preposterous accusations of “racism”? To understand this phenomenon, let me invoke a concept recently used by John Fekete in another context: the concept of “moral panic.” A moral panic emerges from the impulse to root out all moral evil and to prevent its germination.

Driven by a “zero-toleration” mentality, a campaign of moral panic feeds on itself, always expanding its boundaries (and thus enemies) and intimidating its adherents into ever more fervent demonstrations of compliance and support.

Many on campus – both minorities and non-minorities – apparently believe that such a panic is good for the “racist” souls of White folks. In Paved With Good Intentions, Jared Taylor explains why:

It is widely assumed that if the struggle against racism is not maintained at fever pitch, White people will promptly relapse into bigotry. Thus a great deal of the criticism of Whites is justified on the grounds that it will forestall potential racism…The process becomes circular.

Since Whites are thought likely to turn racist if not constantly policed, it is legitimate to denounce acts of racism they might commit as if they had already done so. In this climate, all charges of racism must be taken seriously because they are potentially true (107).

A couple of years ago, a Black student at Emory reported being racially harassed, eventually falling into silence and curling up into a fetal position. Emory’s president solemnly denounced “renascent bigotry” and imposed new speech-code rules. An investigation proved, however, that it was all a hoax concocted by the student to divert attention from her cheating on a chemistry test.

But today, even hoaxes are defended as being morally true, given the assumption of rampant White “racism.” What does it matter if Twana Brawley was really raped or not by five White New York politicos? The truth is that every once and a while a White man does rape a Black woman. Of the Emory hoax, the head of the Atlanta NAACP said, “‘It does not matter whether she did it or not, because of all the pressure these Black students are under at these predominantly White schools,” (Campus Report, July/August 1993, 5).

In the perfectionist and puritanical climate of a moral panic, even trivial, trumped-up, or absurd charges of “racism” can have valuable political and therapeutic effects. Since racism is a bad thing, the more opportunities to condemn it the better. As a result of this deranged view, “charges of racism can be made with the same reckless impunity as were charges of communism at the height of the McCarthy era,” (Taylor, 23). To ask for the facts supporting the charge is to expose one’s own “racism” and to invite more accusations.

Campus culture provides a fertile field for the flowering of moral panic. The campus equity bureaucracy plays a crucial role in fomenting baseless and capricious charges of “racism.” The income and careers of these people depend on the discovery and extirpation of White“racism.”

Each accusation, no matter how idiotic, is interpreted as evidence of the increased racial tensions on campus; increased “racism” justifies the existence of – and the increased power of – the race-relations experts who must spring into action to avert campus race war.

This readiness to believe any accusation colludes insidiously with the desire of activist minority groups to “mau-mau,” as the insightful Tom Wolfe phrased it, campus flak catchers. “Blacks learned long ago that Whites can be silenced and intimidated by accusing them of racism. White acquiescence has made the charge of racism into such a powerful weapon that it should be no surprise to find that a great many Blacks cannot resist the temptation to wield it,” (Taylor 61).

In short, minorities enjoy assaulting the dignity of ‘Whitey.’ To push an absurd accusation to a successful conclusion is the perfect way to do it and to demonstrate, and thus increase, one’s clout. The equity bureaucracy doesn’t oppose such shenanigans because almost every successfully prosecuted accusation of “racism” results in the hiring of more minorities and equity-specialists, thus driving up their price and increasing their clout.

Even White adminstrators are seduced into this game. By responding to all minority complaints, White administrators, most of whom seem riddled with guilt, can demonstrate their oneness with oppressed peoples, salve their conscience, and placate menacing groups of minority students (with their sun glasses, hooded parkas and military fatigues). Lending credence to every accusation also serves to strengthen the hand of administration.

Administrators like stringent speech codes not only because they testify to the purity of their motives but because these codes generate accusations that help intimidate the majority of students and faculty on campus, making them more dependent upon the intercessory goodwill and power of administrators.

Meanwhile, administrators, being insulated from classroom teaching and most direct interaction with students, are usually able to escape the pernicious effects of the repressive codes they champion. When they can’t, as in the case of Francis Lawrence, they call in their chits and hang on until the tempest blows over.

Countenancing trivial, baseless, and absurd charges of “racism” carries a terrible price.

First of all, it trivializes real racist incidents, which get lost in the moral panic over innocent logos, innocuous words, and legitimate research data.

Second, it sours even good-willed Whites on tolerance and diversity. If they are “racist” by virtue of their skin color, and if almost anything they do can get them into trouble anyhow, why try?

Third, it creates for Whites an intimidating and hostile educational environment. Those in favor of prohibiting the use of words that demean and victimize members of the campus community might want to consider adding “racist!” to their hit list.

Fourth, trivial and baseless charges of “racism” inevitably embitter many Whites, more and more of whom are sick and tired of their ritual role as “racists.” Even the Washington Generals got tired of being programmed losers, and they got paid for it.

And fifth, the moral panic over “racism” has led to outrageous double standards harmful to both Whites and Blacks. As Jared Taylor points out, “Whites are held to a system of ’sensitivity’ requirements that do not apply to Blacks,” (Taylor 217).

Whites are monitored, pestered, and punished for preposterous reasons – for a look, for an innocent word, for wearing a T-shirt, for expressing a plausible argument – but Blacks can say almost anything with perfect impunity. The wording of many speech- and conduct-codes explicitly sanctions such double standards, protecting only certain, privileged minority groups, not all students.

Taking the hint, many minorities advance the absurd but self-exonerating claim that they cannot be “racists,” and then feel free to expound the most absurd and vilificatory racist nonsense ever heard on campuses.

No doubt some Whites, angered by this punitive duplicity, are provoked into “racist” thoughts and acts that would not have occurred to them in a more tolerant and even-handed environment. Moral panic over “racism” may create racists, not eliminate them.

Nor is the moral panic surrounding “racism” good for Blacks and other minorities. The climate of moral panic generated by exaggerated and unfounded accusations of “racism” only serves to dangerously reinforce “an already exaggerated sense of grievance in Blacks,” (Taylor, 87). This is not good for race relations. It encourages Blacks to mistrust all Whites and to see themselves as saintly victims of a system in which they cannot prosper.

Phony or trivial charges of “racism” may seem harmless enough in their particular contexts, but cumulatively they gnaw away at freedom. The argument Catharine R. Stimpson made to defend art is relevant here: “Higher education cannot delude itself into thinking that the arts can lose a little freedom here, the humanities a little freedom there, and everything will still be manageable…For academic and cultural freedom is like air: Pollution in one zone spreads to another,” (CHE, 26 September 1990).

In Fahrenheit 451, that remarkably prescient book, censorship does not come from the top down, but from the bottom up, and it comes through a thousand ostensibly minor restrictions on freedom in the name of humanitarian good will.

There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick… You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred… Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Burn it (Valentine, 53-4).

There are many ways to deal with false and trivial accusations of “racism,” but the one that seems most effective is to sue.

When something Eric Shane, the art historian, had written was said by another scholar to be open to a “racist construction,” Shane threatened to sue for defamation of character and libel.

The chastened critic, and her publisher, took out an ad in several major literary periodicals saying that the “slur” was “wholly unwarranted and [that they] deeply regret[ed] that the suggestion was made.” The ad went on to say that they were “pleased to have this opportunity to withdraw unreservedly this unfounded suggestion and to apologise most sincerely to Mr. Shane for the considerable distress and embarrassment which he has been caused,” (The Times Literary Supplement, 18 November 1994).

Given the moral panic that prevails on many campuses today, threatening to sue may be a more effective way of discouraging the irresponsible use of intimidating epithets than, say, appeals to this country’s principles of due process and free expression that still remain the envy and goal of so many people throughout the world.

More articles by Trout: Disengaged Students and the Decline in Academic Standards & Flunking the Test: The Dismal Record of Student Evaluations.

“The Delusion of White Exceptionalism,” by Alpha Unit

Some Whites have the mistaken impression that what has been happening to Western Whites – and, specifically, to American Whites – is somehow unique in the history of Western civilization.

They seem to be under the delusion that to be White means to be dominant – all the time. The fact that Whites in this country are on the defensive so much of the time, as they see it, dismays them and angers them. Unable to grasp the fact that no status quo is ever permanent, they seek to blame someone, or something, for the reversal of political fortune that Whites, as a race, have experienced in America. It’s Jews. It’s Leftists. As if it matters. Change always comes, one way or another.

Whites are subject to the same vicissitudes of fortune as all other groups of people. White people are not special in this world. They don’t get to be exempt from the problems other groups have to deal with. They are not immune to what groups inflict on one another.

It is a given that groups compete with one another and very often oppress one another. Whites are not unique in what they have done to others. And when the same thing gets done to them, there’s nothing strange about it, no matter how perplexed and upset racists get.

It is a fantasy of White racists that the White race is above all others. It isn’t. The proof is all around. What has happened to other groups of people happens to Whites, too. It is the way of the world.

Racists, who are unable to understand this, are essentially children. They cannot face the realities of the world or of humanity as they are.

"The Delusion of White Exceptionalism," by Alpha Unit

Some Whites have the mistaken impression that what has been happening to Western Whites – and, specifically, to American Whites – is somehow unique in the history of Western civilization. They seem to be under the delusion that to be White means to be dominant – all the time. The fact that Whites in this country are on the defensive so much of the time, as they see it, dismays them and angers them. Unable to grasp the fact that no status quo is ever permanent, they seek to blame someone, or something, for the reversal of political fortune that Whites, as a race, have experienced in America. It’s Jews. It’s Leftists. As if it matters. Change always comes, one way or another. Whites are subject to the same vicissitudes of fortune as all other groups of people. White people are not special in this world. They don’t get to be exempt from the problems other groups have to deal with. They are not immune to what groups inflict on one another. It is a given that groups compete with one another and very often oppress one another. Whites are not unique in what they have done to others. And when the same thing gets done to them, there’s nothing strange about it, no matter how perplexed and upset racists get. It is a fantasy of White racists that the White race is above all others. It isn’t. The proof is all around. What has happened to other groups of people happens to Whites, too. It is the way of the world. Racists, who are unable to understand this, are essentially children. They cannot face the realities of the world or of humanity as they are.

Teabaggers Aren’t About Race

Oh, of course not. What ever gave you that idea?

What a dumbass cracker! Can't even spell nigger!

One thing I think is clear is that Teabaggers are not White Nationalists. White Nationalists for the most part don’t like any Blacks period. Teabaggers are more like typical White racists. If you study White racism, you know that in the US, these folks always had a Pet Negro or two around. Sort of like a pet dog or pet goat. Not really human, but still quite lovable. And the Teabaggers have a few Pet Negroes here or there. What can you say? Every race has its traitors!

Teabaggers are not about race! Michael Steele (R-House Negro) even said so!

So, the Teabaggers do not really hate Obama because he’s Black. Mainstream US racism has gone far beyond that. If he was a Pet Negro, they’d cuddle right up to him. He’d even be advantageous to use as a rejoinder to the racism charge.

Why do the Teabaggers, the Republican Party, and the entire US rightwing hate Obama? Obama’s an uppity nigger; he’s a Negro that just don’t know his place at all. The White folks done told him over and over, “Boy! Now you sit down and be quiet, boy! You hear me?”

But Obama’s one uppity Negro, and he just won’t sit down or shut up and let The Man take over and do what’s best. Obama is a proud Black man who is working to better his people, and we ain’t gonna have none of that around these here parts. Y’all best believe me when I say that!

Spanking Lowers IQ?

A very interesting study implies that spanking lowers IQ by approximately 2.8-5 points, on average 3.9 points. The more the kid is spanked, the more the IQ drops. Kids were tested at age 5 and then retested at various ages after that. The kids that were spanked the most had their IQ’s drop the most. The worst drop was seen for kids who kept getting hit into the teen years.

The study looks pretty good, because it is looking at IQ’s at a certain age, and then correlates the actual falls in scores with an environmental variable, in this case spanking.

This tends to rule out parental IQ and genetics. I.e., the stupider the parent, the more they are going to hit the kid, and the smarter the parent, the less they hit their kid, since beating your kid is a pretty stupid thing to do. Or on the other end, the dumber the kid, the they act up, and the more they get hit. The smarter the kid, the better they act, so the they get hit.

But it is not normal for an IQ score to fall like that, so that would tend to rule out these confounding variables.

Black parents spank and hit their kids like crazy. I’ve seen them doing it many times, often in public. It’s conceivable that Black IQ scores could rise by 4 points or so if Black parents would quit beating on their kids so much.

Black IQ scores in the West are very interesting. Setting US White IQ = 103, Black IQ at age 5 = 98, yet at age 24 = 89.8. 98 is a very high score, and it’s only 5 points below Whites. If you have spent a lot of time around really young Black kids, you will notice that they are not exactly stupid at all. In fact, they seem to be quite alert, curious and actually intelligent.

Yet after age 5, Black IQ starts to drop, and by age 24, it has fallen to 89.8. There are very reasons suggested for this drop. One is that the extreme positive environment in the US artificially elevates US Black scores in youth, when environmental effects are strongest. Environmental effects tend to fade with adulthood, when genetic effects tend to kick in. So the drop is just genes kicking in, and the early charge is not sustained.

Others say that Blacks mature faster, and this explains the dropping scores, but I analyzed Black IQ scores in Africa deeply, and I found little if any drop, certainly not a 10 point fall. White scores do not drop at all with age.

So heavy Black corporal punishment may be one of the factors in that 10-point fall.

Let’s look at the lineup:

Upper tier
US Jewish                       116
US Black African                110
US East Indian                  109
US East Asian                   108
US White                        103
US average                      100
US Black age 5                  98
US Hispanic  (2nd generation)   98

Lower tier
US Filipino                     97
US Eskimo                       94
US Hispanic  (average)          92.5
US Amerindian                   92.5
US Polynesian                   90
US Black age 24                 89.8
US Hispanic  (1st generation)   88
US Hmong                        85

Some things need explaining in this chart.

First of all, the US White IQ has been changed from 100 to 103, so everyone’s score has been bumped up three points as a result. This is because tests used to be normed at the US White score = 100, but they changed that recently and now the US average = 100 and the US White score has been bumped up three points, because White scores are three points higher than the US average.

All scores are for the ethnic group inside the US, not in their home lands, where scores may and do differ. Hence, scores are lacking for many groups in the US since I lack access to scores in the US.

Indian (109 versus 85) and African (110 versus 70) immigrant scores are much higher than in their countries. This is obviously some selective immigration going on here. We are selecting mostly the best and brightest of the Africans and Indians, as it ought to be.

US East Asian does not include Hmong or Filipinos, and generally = Koreans, Chinese and Japanese.

US Jews are Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews might only score 93 or so.

I am guessing, but I think that Hmong scores are artificially depressed due to poor English language skills. Their test scores show a profound high math and very poor verbal trend. I have met many of these people, and they are not unintelligent at all.

The fact that Black kids have high IQ’s, and Black African immigrants have some of the highest IQ’s in the US (Higher than US Whites!), shows that racist stereotyping along the lines of “niggers ain’t got no brains,” still widely seen among racists, lacks empirical rigor on the individual level anyway, depending especially on age cohort and nation of origin.

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SCs6pSE8_I]

Charming, charming.

The Congressional Black Caucus is ferociously booed on their way into Congress. The booers are teapartiers, and for some very odd reason, 10

At around the same time, the tea partiers yelled, “Faggot!” at Barney Frank.

A White Republican lunatic screamed “Baby killer!” at a White Democratic lunatic, Bart Stupak, on the floor of Congress. Why? Because Stupak is going along with some less restrictive anti-abortion language than the crap he originally put in, and he was supporting the bill.

Seriously, this shit is pitiful. White people are going stark raving nuts in this country. I’m embarrassed of my lack of melanin.

It’s times like this that I must reluctantly agree that the declining White population of America is a good thing in a certain way. 9

They lost this one, and this is just the beginning of the end. The days of Reactionary White America are waning. As Whites decline and non-Whites increase, there will be problems, but we will finally get some good socialist programs here in these benighted United States.

I’ve changed my mind on the health care bill. It sucks, but it’s better than nothing. It’s a progressive change. You figure that anything that every Republican and most of the Blue Dogs in Congress is against has got to be a good thing. 10

So this is the beginning of the Republicans’ Waterloo. They had to kill this. It’s all about ideology. The particulars of the bill are unimportant. In fact! This is nearly a carbon copy of the alternative bill that the Congress Republicans proposed in 1993 during the fight over Clinton Care. Now they’re all lined up against it, over my dead body! What the fuck, Republicans?

But it’s really about what this bill represents. It represents, yes, socialism. It’s a repudiation of neoliberal metaphysics that says that everything of any value in society must come from the market, not from the state. It’s a body blow to neoliberalism and their whole unbridled capitalism, smash the state ideology.

As William Kristol noted in 1993, Clinton Care had to be opposed because it might work, and people would probably like it. And we can’t have people deciding that government programs have good mouth feel. No. Government programs are evil. Government must not be allowed to do anything good. Once people start deciding that government programs are actually fun rides for the average Joe, the Free Market game is up.

Look at how furious the Republicans are! They’re hopping up and down like they’ve got bumblebees up their asses! There’s got to be a reason for that. Screw the specifics, this was all about ideology. And with this defeat, their ideology suffered a devastating blow.

They’re going to run on overturning it in the next election, but I doubt if that will work. But they’re sure to have the entire corporate MSM media behind them all the way. I’d be surprised if one outlet comes out for ObamaCare.

Several state attorney generals are filing suit against the bill, claiming it is unconstitutional. On what basis might this bill be unconstitutional? I can’t see how that’s going to go anywhere.

Worse, there is talk about appealing the bill to the Supreme Assholes of the SCOTUS. Judging from some of their latest rulings, including the corporate money is free speech outrage, possibly the worst ruling since Dred Scott, my heart sinks. These Supremes are just insane enough that they might decide on the usual fraudulent, conjured out of thin air grounds, to overturn the bill. It’s a frightening prospect.

Tea party rallies area about 9

But the White nationalists have made it completely clear on their websites. They are saying what few others will dare to say. Jared Taylor and the Occidental Dissent folks are explicit that ObamaCare is a transfer of wealth from Whites to Blacks and Hispanics. And this is why they oppose it.

Well, of course. .

As with so many things in our society, opposition to ObamaCare is so about race.

"Common Ground," by Alpha Unit

Some of the most subversive characters to exist in this country could be found in the Deep South, beginning in the late 1950s. They were regular people doing what regular people weren’t supposed to do somehow: Black people and White people working together and hanging out together and carving out an exception to the system of Jim Crow. Florence, Alabama – located in the northwestern corner of Alabama – was the original locus of this activity. These untoward doings were centered right above the City Drug Store in Florence. Tom Stafford, who was directing it, was the son of the drugstore pharmacist. He loved music and enjoyed hanging out with some of the local young musicians, when he wasn’t managing a movie theater in town. Some of the aspiring musicians he knew were Dan Penn, Billy Sherrill, Rick Hall, and Spooner Oldham. Rick Hall had been trying to get into the music business in Nashville. He began his career playing fiddle for a local Alabama country group, but he soon found success as a songwriter in Nashville; he wrote “Aching Breaking Heart,” which became a hit for George Jones. Later he became a songwriting partner with Billy Sherrill, who had played blues as a teenager in Alabama. As a songwriting team they had some success with a song they wrote for Roy Orbison. The two formed a band that played rock and rhythm-and-blues; they called themselves The Fairlanes. They liked this music called rhythm-and-blues and knew that White people enjoyed it as much as Black people did. It gave Rick Hall the impetus to say good-bye to Nashville. That, along with his dissatisfaction with songwriting royalties. He and Sherrill left Nashville and started pitching songs to James Joiner, the owner of Tune Records and Publishing Company in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They were going to stick with rhythm-and-blues. Muscle Shoals had been a local gateway of sorts to Nashville; anyone who could make an impression there stood a better chance of impressing people elsewhere in the music industry. Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were ready to stake it all on Muscle Shoals instead. It was James Joiner who put them in touch with Tom Stafford. The three men – Stafford, Hall, and Sherrill – shared enthusiasm for the music and became business partners. It was their new publishing company – the Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME) – that was located over the drug store. The partnership was short-lived, though. Rick Hall separated from Sherrill and Stafford and opened his own recording studio – keeping the old name – on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals. Not long afterward he recorded the first hit record from the area, a song called “You Better Move On” by a local Black singer named Arthur Alexander. With money he made from that record, Hall was able to move his studios to a new building on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals. The second hit he recorded was also by a Black singer, Jimmy Hughes. Other Black singers were soon coming to FAME Studios, singers like Etta James and Joe Tex. Rick Hall was getting attention from Blacks and Whites alike. As his wife Linda tells it:

They’d just come by and see what was going on because this was the early sixties and that wasn’t the thing to do, Black people working with White people. But Rick did it anyway, and enjoyed it, and has always been able to relate well with Black people. It’s always been a good marriage.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rick Hall could relate well to Black people. His beginnings hadn’t been that different from those of many Blacks in Alabama during the same time. Born in 1932, he grew up dirt poor with a single father after his mother left the family. His father moved to Ohio to take a job in a defense plant, with the intention of making enough money to buy land in Alabama. After the war, Rick and his family returned to Alabama where his father became a sharecropper. If you were poor and living in rural Alabama during the period leading up to the Depression, you didn’t have that many options for survival. Sharecropping and tenant farming were life, whether you were White or Black. Sharecropping was the system whereby you worked on someone else’s land and paid them with a portion of the crop. Generally, if all you brought to this deal was your labor and you depended on the landowner for the rest, you would get a third. If you had your own draft animals, equipment, and supplies, you could get half. Typically, though, you were impoverished and perennially in debt. You had substandard housing (to put it mildly), poor sanitation, a lousy diet, and susceptibility to the kinds of health problems created by the aforementioned conditions. You were also socially isolated. People usually associate tenant farming with the postbellum period in the South, but it had existed in Alabama prior to the Civil War – and all of the farmers had been White. After the war, there was a serious disruption in the agricultural system, since most labor had been performed by slaves. Many of the former slaves left the farms and plantations and moved into cities. Fields went uncultivated and land values depreciated. The people who owned the land knew something had to be done. They saw newly freed Blacks as the best source of labor, so they encouraged Blacks to return to the plantations for wages. The deal they had in mind was for Blacks to live in the old slave quarters and work in gangs as they had during slavery. Well, it didn’t go over that well. Freed Blacks didn’t really care to return to the old slave quarters. And they weren’t too crazy about working in gangs, either. So much for all that fondness Black people had for slavery. Another problem, perhaps the main one, was that landowners had little money to pay laborers. A system of cooperation had to exist in order for agriculture to work. So landowners, freed Blacks, and poor Whites all coexisted in this system. The White landowners dominated both the poor Blacks and the poor Whites. In time, White sharecroppers in Alabama outnumbered Black, except in the Alabama “Black Belt.” Poverty is one hell of an equalizer. These were some of the ties that bound Whites and Blacks in Alabama when guys like Rick Hall, Billy Sherrill, and Tom Stafford were growing up there. And music created a significant bond. That’s what music seems to do; it penetrates all kinds of barriers people put up between one another. When it touches you, you can’t be untouched. The music producer Sam Phillips, who grew up near Florence the son of a cotton farmer, called this area a “melting pot of musical influences”:

When I was growing up, we heard it all. In the fields we heard the Black man’s blues, in the churches we heard Black spirituals and White gospel, and on the radio we heard the Grand Ole Opry and those glorious songs from Tin Pan Alley. Out of that we created a sound that’s hard to define, hard to pigeonhole…

All of these influences were a part of the background from which the music of Muscle Shoals emerged. What brought Muscle Shoals to national prominence was the song known as its musical anthem:”When A Man Loves a Woman,” recorded by Percy Sledge. It was a different producer, Quin Ivy, who recorded Percy Sledge, but he sent the song to Rick Hall, who loved it. Hall then contacted Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records in New York; Atlantic recognized a hit and released it. It was the first song recorded in Muscle Shoals that became an international success. Jerry Wexler liked the idea of recording in Muscle Shoals. As he told it:

Rigor mortis had set in up north. I had spent a decade recording with written arrangements. The arrangers were out of ideas, the musicians were out of licks and we were out of our minds. I was reinvigorated by this Southern method of recording. Once I had a taste of it, I loved it. It was like a religious retreat.

Of the session musicians in Muscle Shoals, he said:

These were country boys. They weren’t hicks by any means, but they were good old boys who loved country music but hated playing it. They had taken a turn toward a little more sophisticated type of music, which was rhythm-and-blues. They shared common experiences with the Black artists they played with – they all walked with the same mud between their toes.

Jerry Wexler brought other talent to record in Muscle Shoals. (He also brought his own engineer, Tom Dowd, a move that didn’t really appeal to Rick Hall.) An artist who had a similar background to Rick Hall’s – sharecropping, dysfunction, a certain rebelliousness – was Wilson Pickett, who had had success at Stax. He recorded some of his biggest hits at FAME Studios. Wexler also brought Aretha Franklin. The song that established her in the music industry, “I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Loved You),” came out of Muscle Shoals. The truth is, by the time Rick Hall began recording Black artists at FAME Studios, the slow dismantling of segregation was already underway in the South. The Civil Rights movement coincided with some of his greatest success. But music was common ground for Black Americans and White Americans in the South before civil rights was expected or fashionable. Some things just seem to be stronger than Race.

References

Fuqua, Christopher S. 2005. Music Fell on Alabama: The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.

“Common Ground,” by Alpha Unit

Some of the most subversive characters to exist in this country could be found in the Deep South, beginning in the late 1950s. They were regular people doing what regular people weren’t supposed to do somehow: Black people and White people working together and hanging out together and carving out an exception to the system of Jim Crow.

Florence, Alabama – located in the northwestern corner of Alabama – was the original locus of this activity.

These untoward doings were centered right above the City Drug Store in Florence. Tom Stafford, who was directing it, was the son of the drugstore pharmacist. He loved music and enjoyed hanging out with some of the local young musicians, when he wasn’t managing a movie theater in town.

Some of the aspiring musicians he knew were Dan Penn, Billy Sherrill, Rick Hall, and Spooner Oldham.

Rick Hall had been trying to get into the music business in Nashville. He began his career playing fiddle for a local Alabama country group, but he soon found success as a songwriter in Nashville; he wrote “Aching Breaking Heart,” which became a hit for George Jones.

Later he became a songwriting partner with Billy Sherrill, who had played blues as a teenager in Alabama. As a songwriting team they had some success with a song they wrote for Roy Orbison.

The two formed a band that played rock and rhythm-and-blues; they called themselves The Fairlanes. They liked this music called rhythm-and-blues and knew that White people enjoyed it as much as Black people did. It gave Rick Hall the impetus to say good-bye to Nashville. That, along with his dissatisfaction with songwriting royalties.

He and Sherrill left Nashville and started pitching songs to James Joiner, the owner of Tune Records and Publishing Company in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They were going to stick with rhythm-and-blues.

Muscle Shoals had been a local gateway of sorts to Nashville; anyone who could make an impression there stood a better chance of impressing people elsewhere in the music industry. Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were ready to stake it all on Muscle Shoals instead.

It was James Joiner who put them in touch with Tom Stafford.

The three men – Stafford, Hall, and Sherrill – shared enthusiasm for the music and became business partners. It was their new publishing company – the Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME) – that was located over the drug store.

The partnership was short-lived, though. Rick Hall separated from Sherrill and Stafford and opened his own recording studio – keeping the old name – on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals. Not long afterward he recorded the first hit record from the area, a song called “You Better Move On” by a local Black singer named Arthur Alexander.

With money he made from that record, Hall was able to move his studios to a new building on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals. The second hit he recorded was also by a Black singer, Jimmy Hughes. Other Black singers were soon coming to FAME Studios, singers like Etta James and Joe Tex. Rick Hall was getting attention from Blacks and Whites alike. As his wife Linda tells it:

They’d just come by and see what was going on because this was the early sixties and that wasn’t the thing to do, Black people working with White people. But Rick did it anyway, and enjoyed it, and has always been able to relate well with Black people. It’s always been a good marriage.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rick Hall could relate well to Black people. His beginnings hadn’t been that different from those of many Blacks in Alabama during the same time.

Born in 1932, he grew up dirt poor with a single father after his mother left the family. His father moved to Ohio to take a job in a defense plant, with the intention of making enough money to buy land in Alabama. After the war, Rick and his family returned to Alabama where his father became a sharecropper.

If you were poor and living in rural Alabama during the period leading up to the Depression, you didn’t have that many options for survival. Sharecropping and tenant farming were life, whether you were White or Black.

Sharecropping was the system whereby you worked on someone else’s land and paid them with a portion of the crop. Generally, if all you brought to this deal was your labor and you depended on the landowner for the rest, you would get a third. If you had your own draft animals, equipment, and supplies, you could get half.

Typically, though, you were impoverished and perennially in debt. You had substandard housing (to put it mildly), poor sanitation, a lousy diet, and susceptibility to the kinds of health problems created by the aforementioned conditions. You were also socially isolated.

People usually associate tenant farming with the postbellum period in the South, but it had existed in Alabama prior to the Civil War – and all of the farmers had been White. After the war, there was a serious disruption in the agricultural system, since most labor had been performed by slaves. Many of the former slaves left the farms and plantations and moved into cities. Fields went uncultivated and land values depreciated.

The people who owned the land knew something had to be done. They saw newly freed Blacks as the best source of labor, so they encouraged Blacks to return to the plantations for wages.

The deal they had in mind was for Blacks to live in the old slave quarters and work in gangs as they had during slavery. Well, it didn’t go over that well. Freed Blacks didn’t really care to return to the old slave quarters. And they weren’t too crazy about working in gangs, either. So much for all that fondness Black people had for slavery.

Another problem, perhaps the main one, was that landowners had little money to pay laborers.

A system of cooperation had to exist in order for agriculture to work. So landowners, freed Blacks, and poor Whites all coexisted in this system. The White landowners dominated both the poor Blacks and the poor Whites.

In time, White sharecroppers in Alabama outnumbered Black, except in the Alabama “Black Belt.”

Poverty is one hell of an equalizer.

These were some of the ties that bound Whites and Blacks in Alabama when guys like Rick Hall, Billy Sherrill, and Tom Stafford were growing up there. And music created a significant bond. That’s what music seems to do; it penetrates all kinds of barriers people put up between one another. When it touches you, you can’t be untouched. The music producer Sam Phillips, who grew up near Florence the son of a cotton farmer, called this area a “melting pot of musical influences”:

When I was growing up, we heard it all. In the fields we heard the Black man’s blues, in the churches we heard Black spirituals and White gospel, and on the radio we heard the Grand Ole Opry and those glorious songs from Tin Pan Alley. Out of that we created a sound that’s hard to define, hard to pigeonhole…

All of these influences were a part of the background from which the music of Muscle Shoals emerged.

What brought Muscle Shoals to national prominence was the song known as its musical anthem:”When A Man Loves a Woman,” recorded by Percy Sledge. It was a different producer, Quin Ivy, who recorded Percy Sledge, but he sent the song to Rick Hall, who loved it. Hall then contacted Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records in New York; Atlantic recognized a hit and released it. It was the first song recorded in Muscle Shoals that became an international success.

Jerry Wexler liked the idea of recording in Muscle Shoals. As he told it:

Rigor mortis had set in up north. I had spent a decade recording with written arrangements. The arrangers were out of ideas, the musicians were out of licks and we were out of our minds. I was reinvigorated by this Southern method of recording. Once I had a taste of it, I loved it. It was like a religious retreat.

Of the session musicians in Muscle Shoals, he said:

These were country boys. They weren’t hicks by any means, but they were good old boys who loved country music but hated playing it. They had taken a turn toward a little more sophisticated type of music, which was rhythm-and-blues. They shared common experiences with the Black artists they played with – they all walked with the same mud between their toes.

Jerry Wexler brought other talent to record in Muscle Shoals. (He also brought his own engineer, Tom Dowd, a move that didn’t really appeal to Rick Hall.) An artist who had a similar background to Rick Hall’s – sharecropping, dysfunction, a certain rebelliousness – was Wilson Pickett, who had had success at Stax. He recorded some of his biggest hits at FAME Studios.

Wexler also brought Aretha Franklin. The song that established her in the music industry, “I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Loved You),” came out of Muscle Shoals.

The truth is, by the time Rick Hall began recording Black artists at FAME Studios, the slow dismantling of segregation was already underway in the South. The Civil Rights movement coincided with some of his greatest success.

But music was common ground for Black Americans and White Americans in the South before civil rights was expected or fashionable. Some things just seem to be stronger than Race.

References

Fuqua, Christopher S. 2005. Music Fell on Alabama: The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.

All Or Nothing, Black and White Thinking and How Racism Works

Commenter tulio, responding to a previous comment of mine, makes some interesting observations about racist thinking that I then respond to. The references are to anti-Black racists and White racists who hate non-Whites, but I don’t mean to be a PC dickwad and single out Whites here. Racism is found all over the world in all sorts of groups, in many cases calling itself, tribalism, sectarianism, etc. It works the same way with non-Whites as it does with Whites, and non-Whites can be and frequently are as racist, or more racist, than Whites.

RL: I am kind of confused though. I would not call it self-hating because I don’t hate any part of myself. I mean, I hate what these illegals have done to the city I live in, but then I have to deal with them all day. I shop at the illegal alien supermarket because they’re nicer than the Whites. I go to Spanish language Mass because it’s cooler and the Hispanics are nicer.I talk to the illegals a lot and I get drunk with them in the bars and they put their arms around me like we are best buddies. They say they like me because I’m nice to the Mexicans. But then I really do want them to go back to Mexico. But if I were a Mexican, I would probably be just like them. I don’t hate them as individuals, but I hate what they do to our towns collectively.

Tulio then responds.

tulio: This is a fascinating passage and really shows just how psychologically and sociologically complicated race is in America. I think many people feel just like you. In fact, I’m convinced that extremists, like the Nordicist you mentioned is nothing more than a coping mechanism in the face of dealing with a world full of contradictions, idiosyncrasies, and shades of gray. It makes life psychologically easier and mentally more manageable. You don’t have to be bogged down with all these contradicting thoughts that drain mental energy.Just write off an entire race, hate them, want absolutely nothing to do with them and you don’t really have to think about it. If you ever confront an extremist on anything and you introduce logic that forces them to question their beliefs, they get abruptly upset. And you can see why. You are making their easily manageable world much more arduous. Living with cognitive dissonance isn’t for everyone.

I respond:

Yeah, it’s so much easier just to say, “Fuck em all,” than to say, “Well, some of them are good, and some of them are bad.” Well, then do you hate them or what? If some are good and some are bad, you can’t really hate them. There are not that many real racists who say, “Well, some are good, and some are bad,” because once you say that, it’s hard to hate.

The anti-Black and anti-non-White racists I run into online generally just hate everyone in the group that they dislike, and most of them simply do not befriend, socialize with or date Blacks or non-Whites. You see, once you start doing that, it screws up your whole racist system.

What a lot of the racists do say, though, is that a few, and only a few Blacks are good people. It’s like 5-1

I think a lot of these folks also want to say, “Look, I don’t want to sort out the good Blacks from the bad. Fuck it. Too difficult. Either they’re all ok, or they all suck. Since they’re not all ok, I’m going to say they all suck and just get a divorce from Black people.”

A Few Words on Stereotype Threat

A very smart Black man whom I will not name has been emailing me lately about Black-White IQ differences. It’s not exactly my favorite subject, as it’s so damn depressing (since I’m pro-Black), but nevertheless, I have been engaging him. It’s sad that the Nurture Crowd are falling back on Stereotype Threat (ST). At first it sounds like a brilliant argument, since it has apparently been proven in a number of strictly experimental situations.

But there is a problem with this argument, a deadly one that kills it right in its tracks. If you study ST threat long enough, you finally figure out the depressing truth that ST cannot possibly explain B-W differences in IQ or other tests or achievement results. Because all ST does is take the typical B-W differential in this lineup (let’s call it X) and add to it! It creates a score like X-1

Thus, rather than showing that eliminating threat eliminates the large score gap on standardized tests, the research actually shows something very different.

Specifically, absent stereotype threat, the African American-White difference is just what one would expect based on the African American-White difference in SAT scores, whereas in the presence of stereotype threat, the difference is larger than would be expected based on the difference in SAT scores. (Sackett 2004.)

I’d much rather pin my hopes on a continuing Flynn Effect rather than silly stuff like ST. Black IQ’s have already been rising at 3 pts./decade for 70 years or so, and Black skulls have gotten much larger in the meantime. We can measure the scores and the skulls, and it’s all real and something to cheer about. Assuming this effect continues, and especially if it continues for Blacks but slows or stops for Whites, things could get interesting. Even if Blacks can’t make up the difference, 22 extra IQ points and much bigger skulls (and apparently many more brain cells) in the last 110 years is nothing to shake a stick at.

References

Sackett PR, Hardison CM, Cullen MJ. January 2004. On Interpreting Stereotype Threat as Accounting for African American-White Differences on Cognitive Tests. Am Psychol 59 (1): 7–13.

JewAmongYou – New Race Realist Blog

Jewamongyou.

I know this fellow from the American Renaissance comments section. I rarely comment there anymore because I have tons of enemies on that site who think I am a race traitor – anti-White – anti-racist. They refuse to publish a lot of my comments anyway. Also, increasingly, I find that site distasteful. I realize that’s the moderate end of White nationalism, but WN is not a moderate thing.

The site frankly makes me disgusted, angry and queasy a good part of the time, though there is some good stuff on there. It’s the commenters that really bug me. So many of them seem to hate all non-Whites, and it makes me sick to be around such folks.

Jewamongyou was always one of my favorite posters. He’s a Jewish race realist (great handle by the way), and he was always sober, reasoned, intelligent and often eloquent. There was a kindness and decency about him that was missing from most of the posters. So I was happy to see, via the great Kvetcher, that he has his own site now. Usually, jewamongyou is merely a good writer, but at times, he is simply sublime.

He’s a libertarian, as so many such folks are, and he has a post attempting to explain why race realism and libertarianism go hand and hand. I think he avoids the nasty bits, such as that in Libertarian World, the brainy haves don’t have to help the dummy have-nots.

The have-nots? I dunno. I guess they just get to die in the gutter or something. One of the hazards of Libertarian World is that those wonderful libertarians have to keep stepping over the crumbling bodies of the have-nots whenever they step off the curve. But hey! Small price to pay for no taxes, huh?

He also devotes a lot of his site to Jewry, as apparently he is a religious Jew. He has an interesting take on the Jewish Question, including harsh criticism and maybe opposition to Zionism, avoidance of the pogrom and prosecution narrative of Jewish history and a lack of the typical neurotic Jewish obsession with anti-Semites.

He has a piece on anti-Semites in the race realist movement, and of course it’s swarming with them. His take on Nazis in the movement is sensible and well-reasoned, while avoiding the usual Jewish hysteria. Of course he dislikes anti-Semites, but he regards them as more annoying than anything else (like a wasp you need to shoo out of your house), which in 2010 America, is probably the proper non-neurotic Jewish response.

I’m not sure if Black people will find much to like here, but his site is free from much of the anti-Black animus you typically find on these sites. He has known Blacks whom he respected all through his life.

Though a very long post on why he has told his Jewish daughter he doesn’t want her to date Black guys will leave most Blacks cold.

In his partial defense, it’s an odds argument, not an essentialist one, and that at least makes mathematical sense. Also, I believe that possibly as many as 35-4

Heck, fully 2

For another POV along the same lines, a Black African poster points out that most African Blacks can’t stand African Americans, they don’t do want their children marrying them!

All in all, Jewamongyou is not bad for a race realist blog.

New Liberal Race Realist Blog

Here.

I know who this guy is, but I won’t name any names. I have not read much of what he’s written here other than the opening statement, but I’m in agreement with this project. He also has some liberal race realists in the comments section. I had no idea that there were so many of us. Rather than pushing some sort of “liberal racism” – the typical PC rejoinder to liberal race realism – he is simply trying to find a way to fashion a liberal or progressive project out of the rather discouraging (to us) facts about race, as they come to light.

Clearly, the whole race realist/human biodiversity (HBD) project is now in the hands of the Right, and it does have some major ideological challenges to the Left and liberalism. Nevertheless, I think we are up to the task. There’s no reason to give this whole issue to the Right while continuing to protest with arguments that increasingly seem like disgusting but well-meaning lies.

Furthermore, there are a lot of Whites and males, and especially White males, who are sick and tired of the whole “White People/Men are Evil” line pushed by the PC crowd.

If you go to a California university now, you have to take a Diversity Curriculum that consists of classes that might as well be called White People and Men are Evil. I’ve talked to some White guys who just came out of that program, and they are hopping mad. The general tendency is for folks like that to move to the Right politically, since the Left and the Democratic Party is seen as hostile to Whites and men.

Well, the Left is hostile to Whites and men!

But I’m all about economics, so I’m not about to support rightwing economics (the enemy) just because the Left is bonkers on race, gender, sexual orientation and other crap.

Liberal Race Realism, along with a Liberal analogue to Masculinist Movement, now completely in the hands of the Right, stands a chance of rescuing some of these White and male souls before they take off into rightwing populist la-la land.

It’s time for some real navel-gazing on the Left. It should be clear by now that 40 years of Identity Politics on the Left, now embodied as Queer Theory, Gender Feminism, Critical Race Theory and other forms of jazzed up bullshit soft science, hasn’t done the slightest damn thing for poor people, and especially for poor minorities, in particular for poor Blacks.

Worse, it empowered a horrible rightwing backlash and siphoned a lot of Whites and males off to the neverworlds of rightwing populism. And if we on the Left are working for anyone, it’s for the working classes, the poor, the lower income people, and in particular the minorities among them, who are hurting most of all.

Liberal Biorealism site goes beyond this one by accepting many race realist presuppositions as facts on the ground. It’s notable that they assume that genetics explains most of the B-W IQ difference.

I’m not willing to do that here, at least not yet. As long as that line can still be credibly disputed, and there is no hard consensus on it, I will hold to this optimistic position. My point instead is to say that the tests are valid, and there are intelligence differences among races and ethnic groups, whatever the Hell is causing them. At this sad point, even that is pouring gasoline on the fire of public discourse.

I realize that there is not much in race realism for Blacks, but Blacks should maybe come up with a pro-Black project that takes race realism into account, since this view is only going to grow in the future. For Blacks to throw the whole thing over to hard racists in the Libertarian and Conservative movements, who have nothing but ill will for Blacks, is a mistake.

For instance, it’s typical for rightwing race realists to argue that HBD means that we need to cut off all or most social spending to minorities, since they are genetically inferior, and you’re just throwing good money after bad. Almost all conservative race realists also want to get rid of all anti-discrimination laws. There’s nothing in that but harm for Blacks period, and not just poor Blacks. By not formulating some sort of a pro-Black response to race realism, Blacks risk throwing the ball over to their worst enemies.

More On Epic Bearded Man

The Epic Bearded Man (EBM) video which went viral all over the world for a bit until it seems to have settled down after a few million views, roused quite a bit of commentary on the Web.

Once again, the video shows a fight between Michael, a 50 year old somewhat ghetto-appearing Black man, and Thomas Bruso, a 62 year old White man on a Muni transit bus. The Black man is the aggressor, but EBM retaliates and pummels him badly.

There were many interpretations of it, the best one seeing bullies finally get their comeuppance by harried victims. Also, it was interesting to see a 62 year old White guy, a former Marine wearing an “I am a motherfucker” t-shirt, kick some ass. As older people are of course more victims an aggressors in our society, this ties in with the first one, rooting for the underdog/victim and seeing bullies get their just desserts.

A less noble and more disturbing aspect was that in the world of Black-White crime and general aggression, nowadays anyway, it’s pretty much Blacks doing all the crime and aggression against White victims and not a whole lot going on in the other direction. In fact, the reverse is so unusual these days that the media goes nuts whenever it happens (Duke stripper case, West Virginia sex torture case). So it was a case of of One Man Is Fighting Back.

This is similar to the Arab pride in Osama bin Laden after 9-11. With all the aggressions that the Arabs see being perpetrated on the West, One Man Is Fighting Back. That man being Osama. This is not so much White racism as similar to the Arab reaction of the victims finally standing up and fighting back for once against powerful aggressors who are inflicting a lot of damage. As it’s tied in with victims fighting back, this reaction is related to the first two.

The more disturbing reaction was the mass outpouring of White racism in the comments threads on the EBM video. “Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger!” Commenter tulio seemed to note that there was an almost sexual, orgiastic or dare I say ejaculatory aspect to these comments. Like they were getting a racism speed high. The EBM video was forwarded all over the White nationalist and White racist web, and this probably added to the comments.

Anyway, a typical reading of the video was, “Niggers just can’t behave like civilized humans.” Another reading was from Blacks, defensive in nature. They saw EBM as a White racist who started the fight by making racist comments. Michael was just fighting back against racist baiting.

The timeline of the incident is hard to figure, but it does not appear that EBM was making racist comments. At the bus stop, he had been going on and on about his new shoes that he bought for his Mother’s funeral and how he was going to get them shined. “My boy is gonna shine my shoes,” he was saying. I guess that means his White friend or something. He got on the bus and kept talking about the shoes and how he was going to get his boy to shine them.

Michael, drunk, got on the bus and overheard them and read racist intent into the comments: that Bruso was going to get some Black guy, a boy, to shine his shoes. This started the whole misunderstanding.

As we learn more in later days, things become even more confusing. Bruso is a regarded as a sometimes-violent loon with unknown mental issues that sound like PTSD.

Here is a photo from Troy Holden in 1996 of Bruso in San Francisco. Bruso used to walk past Holden’s shop on 2nd and Market every day with a loaf of sourdough in his hand, stop in front of the shop, wave the sourdough in Holden’s face, give the finger and scream obscenities about the San Francisco 49’ers. So Bruso is a long-term street loon in the Bay Area for at least 14 years.

He “goes off his meds sometimes,” and then he can become violent and troublesome, but mostly he’s a nice guy who is also funny. He’s just a local character.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I1r3dhMUO4]

A new video is available with an interview with the Black guy. The Black guy, whose name is Michael, may not be as ghetto as he dresses and acts in the video, as he doesn’t come off that way in the interview. Even more strange is that the word on the street is that he is gay! He sounds pretty effeminate in the interview, but he also talks about his fiancee back in Georgia.

Rather than being a ghetto thug, he’s just some belligerent drunk. He’s troublesome rather than menacing. You know, like Bruso?

After Bruso got out of jail, the cops were driving him around to coffee shops and giving him free rides all day. He was a local hero with the Oakland police, which probably has quite a few Black officers. Bruso was back in downtown Oakland the next day, which is where he hangs out. Many of the local young Black guys were surrounding him – he was their hero! Bruso was eating it up and hanging out with his new Black friends all day. By the end of the day, he was starting to talk and walk like the young Black males of Oakland, his new best friends.

The more you hear about this case, the more it seems that r had little or nothing to do with it! But so many people tried to read a racial or worse, racist, line into this story. That says more about us than about the protagonists.

Land of the Blond, Home of the Blue

Here we have two maps, one for what I am going to call blond hair, though they are calling it light hair here. The other is for what I call blue eyes, but they are calling them light eyes here.

These are of course the Aryan Prize Jewels. What is funny is that the centers of Blondness and Blueness seem to be in some cases outside of the Land of Odin and Thor.

Blondism, with an epicenter around central Scandinavia.

For instance, the lower half of Finland, plus central Sweden and Norway, are Ground Zero for blonds. You can hardly spit in any direction around there without hitting a wolverine, a caribou, or some blond and blue hottie. If it wasn’t too cold to fuck, the place would be a sexual paradise!

What is interesting about this is that the your true Nazis always held that the Finns are “Asiatics,” and therefore not really White. What’s wrong with almond eyes and submissive, slender women, I’ll never know, but the Mighty Whiteys think this Chinky stuff is no good. Better a strong German woman who looks like she could shot put you across the room I guess. Sometimes Nazis are hard to figure.

Anyway, we see that Russia, in particular far northwestern Russia, is also a Hot Zone for major breakouts of blond and blue, especially for the blue eyes.

The epicenter for blue eyes seems to be a bit east of the blond breakout, around Estonia or just to the east in Russia.

In fact, the center for azure isises seems to be around Estonia or a bit east of there in the Ingrian region, a bit south and further east than the Almogordo of the blonds, noted above as central Scandinavia. Once again, the Nazi types insist that these centers of Aryanism are fatally contaminated with them dirty Asiatic genes.

I would say that these are markers of mutations. One, for blond hair, in central Scandinavia, around 9,000 years ago, and the other, for blue eyes, in Estonia around the same time.

Why they persisted is a mystery, as they add little Darwinian fitness. I assume that the blond and blue chicks were in hot demand by the fur-draped fellows up there. They all jumped on the blond and blue chicks, and the early Neolithic Marilyn Monroe types pumped out lots of babies. What’s surprising is that these evil bitches stealing all the good men were not all killed by their proto-Viking sisters.

Anyway, since gentlemen prefer blonds, the mutation spread, and nowadays we even have blond and blue Jews, though most of those come from bottles and contact lenses.

The maps are interesting. The general Scandinavian – Baltic region seems to be an epicenter, with the Finnic region predominating. Taking the median of the blond epicenter in central Sweden with the blue eyed epicenter around Novgorod in Russia just east of Estonia (Ingria), we get a blond-blue epicenter around Tampere, Finland in southern Finland about 150 miles north of Helsinki. Northwestern Russia has a lot of Finnic and general Scandinavian genes. After all, the St. Petersburg region and environs was ruled by Swedes for centuries.

We have a strange strip of blond along the forbidding Pomeranian coast of Poland, near the Riffians in the Rif and Chleuh in the Middle Atlas.

The Riffians in particular are very light – 36.

Czechs have lighter eyes than Slovaks, and Turks have lighter eyes than most Italians, perhaps due to heavy Slav influence. The far south of Switzerland has darker eyes and hair than the Swiss to the north of them. This is the Italian, Lombard and Romansch speaking region of Switzerland.

Epic Beard Man is 62 Year Old Thomas Bruso

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF6W3206l70]

This video is going viral as Hell right now. It shows a drunken, belligerent younger Black man, possibly around 40, who gets into it with a 62 year old White man, Thomas Bruso, a former Marine and Vietnam vet, on a bus in the Bay Area in the West Oakland area.

The argument starts when Bruso thinks he heard the drunken Black guy asking if he can shine Bruso’s shoes. Bruso says sure, you want to shine my shoes, go ahead. Turns out that’s not what the Black guy said after all, and he gets mad, calls Bruso a racist and threatens to kick his ass. Bruso apologizes, tries to maneuver out of the situation and goes to the front of the bus to get away from things.

The Black man goes to the front of the bus and hits the White guy. Colonel Sanders, or Santa Claus, or whoever he is, jumps out of his heat and beats the Black guy bloody. He is wearing a blue t-shirt that says, “I am a motherfucker!” The shirt has now become famous.

Then he runs off the bus, but he leaves his bag on the bus. The woman filming it, Iyanna Washington, calls the White man “Pinky” during the fight, siding with the Black guy, yelling, “Whoop his White ass!” Later she steals the White man’s bag. The Black man is bleeding from his mouth, but he doesn’t seem to have lost any teeth. He keeps saying what appears to be, “Bring M and M’s.” But he is really saying, “Bring ambulance.” As the Black man is bleeding, the Blacks say they are going to press charges against the White man.

There is another video of the scene outside the bus after the fight. Bruso is very agitated, running around, yelling and screaming, “Motherfucker!” at the AC Transit Authorities. I thought he turned in an excellent performance in this second video and I hope he goes on to star in more roles.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5fnjFVPCek]

Apparently, Bruso is a pretty wild guy. He got tasered at an A’s game last year. Clips are on Youtube. He was sitting in someone else’s seat and drinking when he was ordered to move. He refused to move when the cops came and they cleared the area and tasered his ass something good. Reports say that he turned in an excellent performance at the A’s game. Supporting roles were played by the cops who tasered his out of control White honky ass.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXkwa9uFBss]

Bruso has been arrested and is now in custody on assault charges stemming from this incident. He is under psychiatric observation at the moment, which seems appropriate. The more I think about this case, the less clear-cut things get.

Bruso has created a new Internet meme called Epic Beard Man and the mumbling of the drunken Black guy for an ambulance created another meme called, “Amber lamps.” Epic Beard Man has a Facebook page that is filling up with fans by the minute. He now has over 3,000 fans.

The video is going nuts on Youtube. Almost all viewers, White and Black, think the video is funny, but the video has caused a strange outpouring of racist hatred against Blacks from the Whites on Youtube. Some are saying that the White man is, “The Rosa Parks of the Whites,” which is just idiotic and an insult to Rosa Parks’ great name.

It’s just a fight between a decent guy and a drunken asshole. These situations happen all the time in White World, and the drunken assholes often get pounded just like that, while everyone cheers. I don’t see what this video has to do with race, but many people are starting to score some racist points off of it.

Commenter tulio has some great comments about this video in another post. I will reprint them here:

There is a video that is going bonkers on Youtube right now about a crazy 67-year-old white vet on a bus that beats the shit out of a younger (but not young) Black dude. The Black dude is confrontational and hostile. This video is being posted and forwarded everywhere right now.

Now personally, I think the video is hilarious. The guy deserved to have his ass beat. I don’t know anyone, Black or White that doesn’t take the White guy’s side.

However, look down at the comments. This video has many duplicates on Youtube and they are all filled with the exact same racist comments. I’ve never seen one video on Youtube generate so much racist sentiment amongst Whites.

Not only in volume, but in the speed. A new comment is being posted almost every minute. While most Blacks view it and see a funny video about a shit-talker getting his just desserts and not really a thing about race per se, the comments from whites are jaw-dropping. Besides the obvious “N” bullets being sprayed like a machine gun, it’s almost like an orgasmic experience for the Whites viewing.

The comment that stuck out to me most is where the white guy is likened to being White America’s “Rosa Parks.” That one particularly stuck with me, because I think that’s how many whites view this, on some level.

One guy on another forum a visit said the fact that he was Black made the video more satisfying. I told him that I am Black, and if he thinks it’s cool to see him get beat because he’s Black, then that’s racist and “fuck you”. He responded by calling me a Nigger despite the fact that I and just about every other Black person takes the side of the White guy. Anyway, even the Whites that aren’t posting overtly racist comments seem to be going ape-shit over it.

I have no idea how much the Youtube audience represents the hidden thoughts median White America, when allowed to speak anonymously, that’s a wild card to me. I’m under no illusions that most Whites view Backs as equals, but the level of anger and resentment you see there is stunning. To the point that it makes me wonder how Obama even got elected.

So tying this all in with this ongoing issue with respect of Blacks. I agree with Black Thought in that Whites haven’t shown respect for non-Black minorities historically either. However the disrespect of Blacks goes far and beyond what exists for any other group. I see this when I view anonymous comments.

There’s an underlying deep resentment of blacks. A man on another forum says that he sees Blacks attacked routinely on Youtube by Latinos on Spanish language videos too. As well as Asian videos. While sociologists have traditionally divided the world by White vs. non-White, I’m starting to think it’s more like Black vs. non-Black. At least when viewing social attitudes.

What else could explain why a thematically similar video with a White aggressor received virtually no racist replies.

A white man physically harasses an Asian woman, and the Asian woman kicks his ass badly right there on camera. Now I think this one is even funnier than the bus video. Now one can only imagine the responses if a Black man went up to physically harass a white woman and the white woman beat the shit out of him on tape. It would have 5,000 N-word laced responses within the hour.

So in conclusion, Black Thought and Robert Lindsay are actually both right. After pondering the reactions of this video for a moment, I don’t think their two positions are mutually exclusive.

A Flynn Effect For Filipinos in the US

We have remarked upon a number of cases in which movement from a Third World country to a 1st World country results in an IQ gain for the Third Worlders in the 2nd generation. The results will be listed below and the data can be found by searching the archives on the blog (I’m too weary to look them up and link them); anyway, regular readers have already read the original pieces.

               Pre-West      Post-West*  IQ Gain

Jamaica         71           86          15
US Blacks**     72.5         87          14.5
India           83           94          11
Mexicans        85           95          10
Philippines     86           93.5        7.5
Chinese         97.5         105         7.5
Japanese        97.5         105         7.5
Morocco         84           89          5





Post-West refers to second generation. The figure
for US Blacks is their theorized genetic IQ based on 
African/Caribbean scores plus the White

The Filipinos, Mexicans and US Blacks went to the US. The Indians and Jamaicans went to the UK. Moroccans went to the Netherlands. Gains ranged from 5-15 points in the second generation. This is above and beyond the Flynn gains already taking place, and probably ongoing in most of those countries.

The gains are where these ethnic groups actually closed the gap with Whites by the amount of the gain in the third column. Looked at in another way, these groups closed the gap with Whites by 5-15 IQ points in a single generation. In addition, there are ongoing Flynn gains occurring alongside these migration gains, but they are not showing up as IQ gains because the Whites are pacing and matching the others precisely.

The Filipinos’ IQ’s are 13 points below the 106.5 for Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, giving them an IQ of 93.5. This is a full 7.5 point Flynn rise over the 86 IQ in the Philippines just from moving to the US.

However, Filipinos are starting to come close to US Whites in occupational success due to extra-IQ factors. This is the part that is very interesting. In other words, despite IQ’s that are a full 6.5 points below that of US Whites, Filipinos are beginning to match Whites in occupational success. This is because Filipinos have extra-IQ factors above and beyond the extra-IQ factors that the Whites have.

The extra-IQ factors are simply postulated, but they may have to do with “introversion.” Along with that, we may find self-discipline, orderliness, a strong work ethic, punctuality, ability to follow orders, putting in extra time on the job, cautiousness, ability to self-train and self-teach, etc. All of these things will tend to increase with introversion and probably decrease with extroversion.

As Whites are considerably more extroverted than Filipinos (Asians), Filipinos will probably score better on many extra-IQ factors than Whites, with the end result being that the extra-IQ factors allow the Filipinos to overcome an IQ deficit and nearly reach parity with Whites on the job.

The Filipino figures come from James Flynn’s book, Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ. In the book, Flynn shows that the second generation of Chinese and Japanese made not only remarkable IQ gains against US Whites, going from the 97.5 IQ of their parents to the 105 IQ of the second generation (and passing Whites at the same time) but they were on average working at positions that were 10-20 points above where they should have been working based on their IQ’s.

The question arises, What about US Blacks? The fascinating thing about African-Americans is that they have an unexplained 14.5 IQ rise above and beyond what ought to be their genetic IQ.

The hereditarians have never been able to explain this well. On of their feints is to say that IQ in Africa (= 67) is artificially lowered by malnutrition. Well, possibly, but then why is Black IQ about the same in the Caribbean (= 71)? Keep in mind that Caribbean Blacks often have a small amount of White in them (Jamaicans have

That means they are mentally retarded, but we have already had the discussion about this on the blog. The commenters and I agree that Blacks in Africa and the Caribbean with 70 IQ’s are not retarded in the sense that a White person with a 70 IQ is. In this sense, the tests don’t seem to measure Black intelligence properly. On the other hand, while they are not retarded, I don’t think that your average 70 IQ African is all that intelligent.

I’m getting at a couple of things here. First of all, can Blacks make use of these extra-IQ factors to at least overcome their 13.2 point IQ deficit with Whites in the sense of at least performing above their predicted IQ level on the job? Keep in mind that in order to do that, Blacks would have to display these extra-IQ factors above and beyond the level of the Whites. Since Blacks are the most extroverted race of all, this seems dubious.

On the other hand, we have a large up and coming Black middle class that is itching for success. By dutifully emphasizing the extra-IQ factors listed above, upwardly mobile Blacks will at least be able to perform above their IQ level on the job.

On curious area that no one considers is personal skills. There seems to be a lot of evidence that Blacks are more socially adept than Whites. In jobs where social intelligence and skills are highly valued, conscientious Blacks may be able to outperform their White co-workers and at least partially close the occupational success gap with them.

Second of all, it seems possible that Africans moving to the West may experience ~15 point IQ rise in the second generation. It hasn’t showed up yet, but no one has looked for it. So the 67 IQ Africans by the second generation should be at IQ 83. It’s not that great, but there are more or less functional countries with 83 IQ’s. There aren’t that many with ~70 IQ’s. To the extent that Africa can mirror the environment of the West in Africa itself, they won’t even have to come here.

This is groundbreaking work that is receiving very little ink, less than it deserves. At the very least, rising IQ with migration and extra-IQ factors show that neither is IQ set in stone, nor is it destiny.

References

Flynn, James R. 1991. Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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