From the Weather Underground to the White House
By http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6361
Race Course: Against White Supremacy
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
New York: Random House, 2009
Is a revolutionary’s work ever done? Bill http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5768 and Bernardine Dohrn can rest easy: theirs is.
The aspiring black politician they hosted at their Hyde Park home, Barack Obama, is now the president of the United States. The anti-white invective that animated their terrorist acts in the http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3577 is now the stuff of staid school board pronouncements, ad campaigns of Fortune 500 companies, and the musings of a Republican candidate for president. Their locked-in-the-tissues conviction that the very existence of white people is the primary explanation for human suffering is widely accepted.
Today, the wily Ayers and his wife sit pretty atop American society: he, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose traveling lectures find him hailed in the press as an “anti-war activist” rather than a terrorist, and who enjoys the fawning attention of the New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon; she, an adjunct professor at Northwestern, one of the most prestigious law schools in the nation, and a former employee of white-shoe law firm Sidley Austin despite apparently having never been admitted to the bar. (A hiring partner was friends with Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, once a CEO of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. Sidley Austin also employed Michelle Obama as an associate and Barack Obama as a summer associate.)Bill Ayers, in fact, has been lavished with praise by none other than the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a 1998 edition of its magazine, Teaching Tolerance, he is described as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author.” Ayers, the SPLC tells us, “has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.”
Talk about white privilege. Ayers and Dohrn, themselves white, committed a slew of criminal acts on the way to persuading most of America that whites are something worse than the devil, but escaped unharmed. Only the occasional pesky journalist from Fox News bothers them now, with Ayers responding by threatening to call the police (apparently the racist pigs are sometimes useful).
In their co-written memoir-cum-screed, Race Course: Against White Supremacy, they take a deep bow for their accomplishments, and lay out for all to see just how shallow a revolution can be.
Publisher “Haki R. Madhubuti” of the Third World Press (born Don Lee) tells readers in an introductory note that the book’s release was delayed until after the presidential election for strategic reasons. Would it have mattered? Obama fielded a question or two about Ayers, but as VDare.com’s Steve Sailer observes, the press astoundingly never bothered to read Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father. There’s no reason to think the publication of this book would have invited much scrutiny from a press corps determined to see him elected.
In any event, the book reveals nothing scandalous by today’s standards. It’s peppered with aggressive quotes from Malcolm X (“. . . the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us. I know some of you think that some of them aren’t enemies. Time will tell”) but describes the bombings of the Weather Underground as more of creative writing exercise for gifted suburban students than violent terrorism (“We fought back, we dreamed out loud.”) Should we laugh or cry?
Anyone hoping for some juicy details about a young Bill Ayers sweating out a bus ride through Chicago with a bomb under his jacket will be disappointed (Ayers wrote a previous book called Fugitive Days about his time on the run from the law, which was described by Slate writer Timothy Noah as “self-indulgent and morally clueless . . . Ayers periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn’t gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity.”)
Ayers and Dohrn announce in the introduction to Race Course that their project is part memoir, part defense of their actions, and partly “to inflame the debate about white power and privilege . . . and to participate in a flash course about some of the ways in which every one of our current crises feeds on and intersects with racism.”
On this last front, they do not perform particularly well. They never go beyond the standard approach of declaring “white racism” responsible for America’s, and the world’s, ills, coupled with the usual statistics. One of the advantages of being the victor in a culture war is that you need not debate too vigorously. They’re compelled at one point to include a denial of race as biological reality: “The “science of race” is by now a thoroughly discredited myth,” they say, and quote one Robert Pollack (described as a dissenting colleague of the “racist” James http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2222) as saying that “the genes that regulate the amount of melanin beneath the skin are simply not expressed in the brain. . . . The social responses to race are real, race is not. . . . Race is a choice.” (Should someone have told Frank Ricci?)
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