Below the surface of the ominous calm lies massive anger. Hostility toaffirmative action runs rampant, whether against female firemen whocan’t handle hoses or black teachers who can’t spell. The number ofpeople who would happily run illegal immigrants from the country at gunpoint is huge.
Racism is in bad odor among the virtuous. I wonder why. At least, Iwonder why any discussion of race is thought to be racism. The UnitedStates faces grave racial problems—more accurately, has them butdoesn’t face them. Refusal to acknowledge their existence is notproductive: Few problems are solved by forbidding their mention. Thequestion should not be whether views are racist, but whether they arewrong.
The American Renaissance, run by Jared Taylor, is quite racist inthe poorly thought out and sniffish sense prevalent today. AmRen (as itis generally known) has recently gotten much bad press because it holdsall manner of views whose mention results in pack attack by ourarbiters of What Can Be Discussed: For example, that blacks commitviolent crime at far higher rates than do whites, that massiveimmigration from Latin America offers no advantages to the UnitedStates but a great many evils, that affirmative action lowers thecompetence of government, the universities, and schools in general—andso on.
These ideas are no doubt racist, yes. Unpleasant, yes. But—are they wrong?
I would prefer to think so. It gives me no pleasure and little hopeto hear that black schools regularly produce functional illiterates,that the schools of Detroit and of the nation’s capital and for thatmatter of wherever blacks predominate are disasters, that savagebeatings of whites by gangs of blacks are common and hidden by themedia. That these things happen is of no advantage to me. I would bedelighted to see blacks and Hispanics excelling academically. I wouldlike to walk the streets of American cities without carefully notingpigmentation, which we all do and pretend we don’t. While I like Jaredpersonally, I would like to tell him that his racial ideas were allwrong.
But are they?
On AmRen’s web site you find news stories, taken chiefly from therespectable publications, that in aggregate paint a grim picture ofthings racial in America. Can you show these to be in error, isolatedinstances, not representative of a larger reality? I hope so. But Ican’t. Almost everything I read at AmRen well describes reality as Ihave seen it. And also as all cops have seen it, though telling whatthey know is a firing offense.
What we have is an ongoing catastrophe, documentable, indeeddocumented repeatedly but never openly examined. An apparentamicability is enforced by heavy federal pressure, by a press thatcensors itself, and by that poisonous fog that we call politicalcorrectness.
But consider. From the Detroit News, a story on the illiteracy of the president of the school board, as illustrated by his emails:
“If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb theemergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twainto Boynton which have three times the number seats then students andwas one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.”
Or
“Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside groupcontrol the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of isdirector? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watchdog?”
The president of the school board? Confusing “our” for “are”? Mydaughters had better grammar at the age of three. A city that has sucha man in such a position has no place in a civilized country.
Below the surface of the ominous calm lies massive anger. Hostilityto affirmative action runs rampant, whether against female firemen whocan’t handle hoses or black teachers who can’t spell. The number ofpeople who would happily run illegal immigrants from the country at gunpoint is huge. When the races are not forced together, they separatelike oil and water. The forcing is national policy. It has not proved arecipe for domestic happiness.
The tendency toward segregation equally among the smugly correct and the contents of Joe’s Bar. Many years back, the Washingtonian, the vaguely heterosexual coffee-table magazine of the District of Columbia, checked on how many of the Washington Post’snews room sent their shiny white children to the city’s black publicschools. Zero. At the first evidence of fertility the town house onupper Connecticut goes on the block and another pair of liberaldiversity-friendly Democrats bail for the albino warrens of MontgomeryCounty. Yet the Post honks and blows most mightily against racial discrimination.
How does this mandated hypocrisy help find a solution to racialwoes—if there is a solution? It doesn’t. I suspect that a prime reasonfor the current uneasy stasis is exactly that people have concludedthat there can be no solution. The best thing is to hold the lid on andlet future generations worry about it.
Suppose that you genuinely want the best for what are quietly calledPermanently Disadvantaged Minorities, and you therefore suggest thatofficials, to include teachers, whose English is below the level ofsecond grade be dismissed. God help you. You will be called a racist,elitist, cultural imperialist, and insensitive, and lose your job. Whybother? All you can do as a responsible parent is to move away from thecrime, to put your children in the whitest schools you can find, on theprinciple that most whites can still read. This of course perpetuatesthe problem.
The same foetor of impossibility engulfs any effort at change. Ifyou try to end the calculated recruitment of incompetence that isaffirmative action, you eliminate a large part of the black middleclass (such as the above-mentioned president of Detroit’s school board)and hell breaks loose. What do you do?
Nothing. Which is what we are doing. It is what we will continue to do.
The folk at the American Renaissance? They don’t offer much in theway of solutions, but I don’t fault them for this since I can’t offer asolution either. Anything that might work is politically impossible,and anything that is politically possible won’t work. It may be thatnothing would work.
Are Jared Taylor and his fellows wrong in their description of thedisease? Let’s hope. But I fear they aren’t. Whether, or that, they areracists doesn’t matter. Oncologists recognize cancer. They don’tnecessarily like it.
AmRen would be easy to dismiss if it were a pack of bedraggled Nazisranting about how Jews sacrifice Christian children. But it isn’t,which is why it is disturbing. Normally a story like the foregoing talefrom Detroit appears locally and is carefully, carefully not picked upnationally. The race of criminals is usually suppressed. The“achievement gap” in schools gets occasional mention, but the gravityof the situation does not. Thus AmRen, aggregating these news storieswithout apology, constitutes a form of intellectual blunt trauma.
But is AmRen wrong?