I remember these scenes vividly.
Sometime in the mid-1950's, when I was
about ten years old, I was in the family car with my foster father on some
errand. My foster father was an Italian-American Lutheran truck driver who
married into an Irish-German family. We had to stop on Perrysville Avenue (this
was in Pittsburgh), right in front of Perrysville High School (as it was known
then). A black cop was directing traffic at the five-way intersection, which
had no traffic light. My foster father remarked angrily, "Damned niggers
are taking over everything!"
Now, I had never seen a black man before,
and did not understand my foster father's anger. But the seething malice was evident
in the way he uttered the words. I gave him what I guess he perceived to be a
"dirty look," but which was simply my astonished but mute inquiry.
When we got home, he beat me with the strap
of his belt. I guess he saw reproach in my glance.
In another episode of
"misunderstanding," the family had company over. We were in the
living room and there was a lively conversation on politics, in which I did not
participate. I don’t recall exactly what the subject was, and I think I was in
my pre-teens. But either my foster father or foster mother asked me: "What
color are we, Eddie?"
I answered: "Beige." Well, I was
the only member of the family who read books. My foster parents had conniption
fits every time I consulted the pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana they had bought for show and shelved in a
glass-door cabinet. I had encountered
the term somewhere, and it seemed more appropriate and truer than was
"orange" or "white." The term was in my vocabulary, not my
family's.
So, "beige" was not the answer
any of the adults expected to hear. I think they all sat stunned, and my foster
parents looked embarrassed.
When the company left, I again heard the
swoop and felt the sting of my foster father's belt.
Yes, racism existed in America then, and it
still exists, and will continue to exist for as long as men think of others in
collectivist terms. Observe the racism and destructive furor evident in
Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of a black man by a white police officer.
Except that it is basically "black" racism. A man who has just robbed
a convenience store, assaulted a police officer, and charged that officer with
every intention of causing him more harm, was shot and killed by the officer.
But the facts and circumstances are irrelevant. The black "youth" is
being touted as a "victim" of white racism.
No one asks: What was the cop, Darren
Wilson, who was injured, supposed to do when the "youth" sauntered
away? Ignore the assault, call in sick and drive to the nearest hospital to
have his injured eye attended to? If he is a law enforcement officer, and
suspected Brown of just robbing a convenience store, he was obliged to act, and
not let Brown walk off to boast to his buddies, "Hey! I just socked a honky
cop and he ain't done nothin' about it!"
In today's politically correct, thought-repressing
climate, imagine what would be said, shouted from the rooftops, and headlined were
the Darren Wilson/Michael Brown roles reversed.
A white man, of the same weight, height,
and nasty disposition as Brown's, barely literate, as well, except in the
"rap" vernacular, and known to most locals as a brutish thug, robs
and manhandles a convenience store clerk, then walks out with merchandise he
did not pay for. A black policeman stops him on the street, asking him to walk
on a sidewalk. The white man assaults the officer, tries to take his gun,
causing it to fire once. He pummels the officer, then walks off. The officer
gets out of the patrol car and tells him to stop. After all, the
"white" Brown has already committed a felony assault on the officer,
in addition to being a suspect in a store robbery that has just come over the
patrol car radio.
The white man turns and charges the
officer, maybe uttering a "rebel yell," intending to inflict further
bodily harm the officer. The officer shoots, several times. The brute is hard
to stop.
The verbally abusive redneck yahoo is
killed.
Would the black officer be accused of
racism? No. it would be the white man. "See," the chorus of the MSM
and race-card players and liberals would cry, "that just proves that
whites don’t respect blacks, even when blacks are part of the establishment.
Let's hang that white trash!"
Michael Brown has not been portrayed as a
thug, but as an "innocent" youngster who meant no harm. All he was doing was walking in the middle of
a busy street. And also, well…getting away with robbery in spite of his
video-taped assault on the store clerk.
The preceding is by way an introduction to
a book by Murali Balaji, published in 2007, The
Professor and the Pupil: The
Politics and Friendship of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.
Balaji is a regular do-gooder contributor
to the Huffington
Post, and seems to want to do for Hindus in this country what CAIR (the
Council on American Islamic Relations) has been doing for Muslims: Empower them
politically, culturally, and socially.
He has written an adulatory character study
of the most influential advocates and propagandists for black racism, William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois (1868-1963), the black sociologist, civil rights
activist, and advocate of one species of racism, a study which parallels Du
Bois's life with that of Paul
Robeson (1898-1976), the black actor, singer, Stalinist admirer of the
Soviet Union, and secret member of the Communist Party of the United States. (His son, Paul
Robeson, Jr. , who went to grade school with Josef Stalin's daughter in
Moscow, had denied it until it the CPUSA boastfully outed him in 1998, calling
him "one of their own").
Du Bois's racial theories -- and there were many until he became as
committed a racist as Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Jeremiah Wright – advanced over
decades by him and his ilk were as vile as the "scientific" racial
theories of Madison
Grant, Houston Chamberlain,
and Joseph
Arthur, Comte de Gobineau.
The current black strain of racism has at
least a century of ideological antecedents. But, it would be appropriate to let
Ayn Rand, the
novelist/philosopher, have the first word on the subject of racism:
Racism is the
lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of
ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic
lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are
produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in
practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but
by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that
the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content)
is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined
before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the
caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited
knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism
is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of
collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various
breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of
determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man
from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects
of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with
chemical predestination.
Yes, black racism is also a form of
collectivism, and much of it was encouraged and propounded by communist and
socialist intellectuals. Du Bois and his successors in racial
"studies" such as Marcus
Garvey, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. , Cornel
West, Derrick
Bell, and Regina
Austin, and a score more offered irrational solutions to racism that
entailed the employment of racial preferences (affirmative action), force, the
inculcation of self-consciousnesses of being "black" (black pride), reclaiming
Africa from capitalist and colonialist Europeans, and blatant bigotry against
any and all whites.
Virtually the only black spokesman in the
20th century for genuine black freedom was Booker T. Washington
(1856-1915) who disagreed with Du Bois about how to go about emancipating blacks from discrimination or achieving equal rights with whites. He thought that
force, preferential treatment, and
"revolutionary" action would only be counterproductive and leave
blacks worse off than before. As they have been left worse off, by chiefly the
Progressive Democrats, who wish to keep blacks in thrall as a tool of
perpetuating the welfare state.
Derrick Bell argued that America was an
intrinsically "racist" country and that its fundamental character as
a nation of laws not of men was but a complicated ruse and dumb show concocted
by whites to perpetuate "white" supremacy and to oppress blacks. Therefore, laws were needed to compensate
blacks for the discrimination and to enforce their preferential treatment. Any
perceived "injustice" to whites in such a program was but reparations
in the name of the ancestors of whites, who may or may not have had anything to
do with enslaving or persecuting blacks.
Bell in the 1970's began to develop his Critical
Race Theory (CRT).
Founded by the late Derrick Bell, critical
race theory is an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided
along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the
way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical
race theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that
consequently the nation's legal structures are, by definition, racist and
invalid. As Emory University professor Dorothy Brown puts it, critical race
theory "seeks
to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective but
designed to support white supremacy and the subordination of people of
color." A logical derivative of this premise, according to critical race
theory, is that the members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact
obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and
are worth observing.
Further, critical
race theory holds
that because racism is so deeply ingrained in the American character, classical
liberal ideals such as meritocracy, equal opportunity, and colorblind justice
are essentially nothing more than empty slogans that fail to properly combat—or
to even acknowledge the existence of—the immense structural inequities that
pervade American society and work against black people. Thus, according to
critical race theorists, racial preferences (favoring blacks) in employment and
higher education are not only permissible but necessary as a means of
countering the permanent bigotry of white people who, as Bell put it, seek to
“achieve a measure of social stability through their unspoken pact to keep
blacks on the bottom.”
Regina Austin, a professor of law at the
University of Pennsylvania, and an advocate of Critical
Race Theory, can be characterized as a high priestess of the theory and how
to practice it in real life. Black criminals should be treated with kid gloves,
or not at all.
Central to Austin’s
“Advanced Torts” course is her claim that minority status confers the privilege
of interpreting the law as one pleases. As writer Heather MacDonald points out,
Professor Austin, in her published articles, has exhorted the black community
to reject the distinction between lawful and unlawful activity as the imposed
strictures of an oppressive white society. Austin pours scorn on such
“traditional values” as “conformity to the law,” which she insists will
“intensif[y] divisions within the black community.”
Austin has also
called on blacks to engage in outright lawbreaking, which she calls “hustling,”
but which in fact amounts to any number of acts of thievery licensed by
Austin’s demands for social justice. Thus, “clerks in stores [who] cut their
friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their
contraband around the neighborhood,” are encouraged by Austin to occupy the
“good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of
lawbreaking.”
Much of this thinking is either Marxist in
essence or heavily influenced by Marxism. The riots in Ferguson, Missouri this
month are a direct application of those ideas, trickled down from academia to
government programs and a compliant news media, and ultimately, to "the
street."
Then there are the non-intellectual
preachers and promulgators of the same vicious ideology, such as Nation of
Islam head Louis
Farrakhan, and retired minister to President Barack Obama, Jeremiah
Wright. In addition, there were the Black Panthers, individuals such as
Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, and numerous
other "activists." Whether it is the naked "whitey is the
devil" claim of Farrakhan's or the "black theology" of Wright's or
Bell's Critical Race Theory, they are all collectivist in their fundamental
premises. There are as many variations of black racism as there are of white
racism, but they are all evil.
The racial philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois,
for example, in Balaji's description of the "Doctor's" world view,
moved in stages over time from concocting the notion of a "Talented
Tenth" of American blacks – the notion that the "best and
brightest" would, after being educated and proving their worth to live in
a "white-dominated" society, help to uplift the balance of blacks
from poverty and ignorance – to an unreserved endorsement of the Soviet Union,
with full knowledge of Stalin's genocide and the murderous purge of the
Communist Party of its original founders (such as Trotsky and other Inner Party
luminaries). Both Du Bois and Paul Robeson were certain that the Soviet way of
government was the blacks' only hope of achieving equality, dignity and
freedom.
Du Bois and Alain
Locke, his contemporary at Howard University, championed the New Negro and the
Talented Tenth, a belief that those blessed with the "natural"
proclivity for intelligence and education would lead the uplift of the Negro
race…But Du Bois's first political awakening came after a visit to the Soviet
Union, where he saw firsthand the application of Socialist principles.
Du Bois and Robeson both viewed Germany and
Italy's Fascism as the inevitable result of capitalism, colonialism, and an
"innate" European desire to subjugate the "dark races." This
is pure Marxism. And both men –the
recipients of university education, in which they seemed to excel – viewed the
Soviet Union as the chief bulwark against "white supremacy," as well
as the imperialism of Japan in spite of its literal rape of China in the 1920's
and 1930's, simply because the Japanese were not "white." Robeson
opposed this view of Du Bois's, which absolved Japan of its own brand of racism
against the Chinese and Mongolians. Robeson asked the logical question:
If the Japanese had
"no regard" for the Chinese, how could they have any regard for
African Americans? Robeson would argue this point as he became more absolute in
his opposition to colonialism and Fascism. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Robeson led the charge to demonize Fascists, who existed
"not only in Germany, Italy (and) Japan, but in Canada, the United States,
the West Indies (and) Africa."
Du Bois and Robeson both visited the Soviet
Union at least twice, were given the red carpet treatment, and saw what the
Soviets wanted them to see. They were consequently bedazzled by the Soviets'
alleged campaign against racism and concern for the "minorities" in
the Soviet empire. While Du Bois remained skeptical about a Soviet-style system
working in America, Robeson remained for the rest of his life enamored of the
Soviet Union. It could do no wrong, not even when he had knowledge of the
monstrous wrongs it was committing.
So [Robeson] stayed
loyal, proclaiming that the Soviet Union's lead in the global freedom struggle
and their fair treatment of minorities made it the one nation that valued human
dignity. Robeson, in one of the rare public comments he made on the [show]
trials, told Ben Davis the Soviets "ought to destroy anybody who seeks to
harm that great country."
Du Bois was that leftist brand intellectual
who donned blinders to the reality of Soviet tyranny – tyranny was okay as long
as it was anti-white and anti-capitalist. Robeson was a forerunner of today's
celebrities who have nothing to say about Islamic atrocities but oppose Israel
defending itself against jihad, and also
excoriate capitalism while enjoying its fruits. Du Bois and Robeson both wound
up embittered hulks nurturing a deep hatred for the U.S. Robeson died of a stroke close to the 200th
anniversary of the founding of the U.S.; Du Bois joined the CPUSA in 1961, and
moved to Ghana, a "socialist police state," and died there in 1963.
The only means of perpetuating racism and
discrimination against blacks or any other "minority,'" or even
against a "majority," however "well-intentioned," is by
force, to nullify the voluntary freedom of association in employment, education
and in other human relationships. Government force, in the hands of racist
politicians or those with a vested interest in perpetuating racism as a tool of
power and "social and political transformation" (such as President
Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder), will only exacerbate racism,
and knowingly promote it (see the careers of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson).
The Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" have had the
opposite effect, ignoring or disparaging the basic principle that the government
is powerless to force a mind (whether or not an individual holds racist views),
but can only corrupt it by introducing the element of legislative compulsion
and therefore stressing the alleged ubiquity of the irrational.
"Black" racism is no answer to "white"
racism, and those are not the only species of racism extant today. For example,
"white" or Semitic Muslims despise Muslim and non-Muslim blacks alike
(in Arabic, blacks are called "abeeds,"
or slaves). Light skinned or "mullatos" or mixed-race blacks look
down on dark-skinned blacks, and vice versa. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams,
black intellectuals who promote individualism and reason, and who oppose any
kind of racism, especially black racism, which they regard as a folly, are
despised by most black civil rights organizations and by liberals and leftists,
as is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
I received my first taste of racism as a
young boy, at the end of a leather strap, a long time ago, because I did not
exhibit an "inherent" white racism which Du Bois, Robeson, and
Derrick Bell, among others, claimed was a permanent character trait of whites.
So I know how vicious any species of
racism can be.
*The
Professor and the Pupil: The
Politics and Friendship of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, by Murali
Balaji. New York: Nation Books, 2007. 481pp.
Excellent essay. You're right of course that black racism is not the answer to white racism and the solution is individualism.
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