Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama
From slavery to Jim Crow to “hope and change,” liberals wrote the book on how to destroy a people. Democrats simply would not treat blacks as the equal of whites, deserving of rebuke for bad behavior just like a white person. Anyone opposed to mollycoddling blacks would be denounced as a racist.
It could be called “racism by mollycoddling,” except that liberals don’t actually want to hurt black people. They couldn’t care less about black people. All they care about is their own glorious selves and how courageous, forward-thinking and fair-minded they are. At least the old Democratic racists were unabashed demagogues. Modern racists wrap themselves in unbounded self-righteousness.
This isn’t a story about black people—it’s a story about the left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else. It wasn’t black people’s job to stop whites from acting like idiots. It took blubberbutts like Jim Dwyer, Anna Quindlen, Tom Wicker, Howell Raines and the Los Angeles Times to treat blacks as always right, never wrong, while self-righteously disparaging execrable, boring, rhythmless white people. Excluding their own hip selves, of course.
There was a whole industry of people that depended on the existence of racism, but Americans had not been delivering on being racists for years. By 1970, there were more child pornographers in the country than racists. So the media set about inventing them.
But no one could acknowledge that fact until the O. J. Simpson verdict.
Here we had a black celebrity, spectacularly guilty of murder but acquitted by a predominantly black jury. The verdict was wildly cheered by blacks across the nation. With those images, we were finally liberated from having to pretend America was run by the Klan. It was a watershed moment. It was the end of white guilt.
The media, politicians and academia had turned blacks into spoiled children who had never before heard the word no. After this one breathtaking miscarriage of justice, the American people said no and the White Guilt Bank was shut down overnight.
With that, America became a much healthier country. Blacks could never be brought into the culture while being so thoroughly infantilized by white liberals who oohed and aahed over every little thing they did.
The only people who had ever benefited from the left’s lunacy on race were (1) professional blacks and (2) self-righteous white liberals, who congratulated themselves on their own ethnic sensitivity while moving heaven and earth to make sure their own kids didn’t go to school with black kids.
In 1993, a few years before the Simpson verdict, New York Times columnist Brent Staples complained that “black prep school boys who study the classics and live within the law have found only marginal acceptance in American cultural reality.” American culture, he said, preferred to celebrate the “angry black men.”39
After the OJ trial, “angry black men” were a lot less attractive. Talented black people were in.
Blacks were the only people, as we discovered with the OJ verdict, who cheered criminals just because they were the same race. It’s one thing to complain if an innocent member of your race is falsely accused. But when the guy turns out to be guilty, it’s hard to imagine any other group instantly siding with the perp because of some shared characteristic. You didn’t have white people rooting for Charles Manson, gays hoping Jeffrey Dahmer would be acquitted or Hispanics supporting Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. (Liberals rooted for Teddy Kennedy, but that’s another book.)
After the OJ verdict, blacks’ ferocious group identity began to weaken.
By 2007, an NPR/Pew poll showed that 53 percent of blacks said that those who couldn’t get ahead were mostly responsible for their own condition, compared to 30 percent who said it was because of discrimination—a reversal of percentages from just a decade earlier.40 (And if NPR came up with 53 percent, just imagine how much higher the actual figure must be!)
Even black people would admit, Yeah it was a scam, but it was fun while it lasted. You can push people too far and the OJ verdict pushed racial browbeating too far, just as raising taxes too high eventually leads people to stop paying them.
Much of the change came in subtle social signals. The daily hair-on-fire racism stories, for example, virtually disappeared. No longer would pompous whites consider it a showstopper to announce at dinner parties that America is still a racist country. Appeals to white self-condemnation no longer worked. White people on TV stopped pretending that it was a hate crime every time a black person got shot. Jesse Jackson was totally sidelined. Even Al Sharpton’s racial agitating no longer got front-page coverage. In fact, Sharpton’s reputation dropped so precipitously that he was forced to trade in his tracksuit for some dress clothes.
The OJ verdict lost everyone except the diehards in the media and the universities—always the last to know. They’d still trot out their groundbreaking America-is-a-racist-country insights now and then, but Americans weren’t buying it.
Despite mounds of incriminating evidence, the jury acquitted O. J. Simpson of a brutal double murder after only three hours of deliberation. It came back to that implacable fact.
Completely inadvertently, that verdict ended up being one of the best things that had ever happened to black America. Only with the waning influence of race hustlers and their white liberal enablers did the world discover that there were loads of competent blacks out there! Where had they been all this time?
Liberals muddled through the next twelve years, disconsolate because their claims of racism were falling flat. Can’t you let us have any of our cherished illusions? Can’t you let us keep being self-professed saviors to the blacks? For liberals, the OJ verdict was like telling them there was no Santa Claus.
Enter half-white, half-Kenyan Barack Obama. He was a dream come true for liberal elites: They could indulge in self-righteousness on race and get a hardcore leftie into the White House at the same time! It was too great a temptation to resist. So now we’re back to liberals finding racists under every bed again.
The “postracial” president has brought racial unrest back with a whoop. Obama toys with it, but mostly he allows others to make despicable racial smears on his behalf. As the New York Times described Obama’s typical campaign strategy back in 2008: “This has been [campaign manager David] Axelrod’s career, an eternal return to Chicago and to the politics of race.”
It’s always the person with the least black heritage who is angriest at the antiracism meetings. The ones who have never actually experienced anything resembling Jim Crow—in fact nothing but white suck-uppery—are the most consumed with rage about things having nothing to do with their life experiences.
Responding to tapes of his insane racist preacher, Jeremiah Wright, Obama said that we need “to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”
Yes, let’s bask in blacks’ exquisite grievances against whites a little longer—just in case anyone missed Roots, Do the Right Thing, Amistad, The Color Purple, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Mississippi Burning, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Monster’s Ball, A Raisin in the Sun, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tuskegee Airmen, Ghosts of Mississippi, Ali, The Green Mile and every ABC after-school special ever produced (except the ones about eating disorders) as well as your entire college education and the last fifty years of the New York Times and all other mainstream media outlets issuing hysterical updates on the unending civil rights struggle. In the last two decades, the Times has run more than 250 articles about the Selma march alone. Selma happened nearly half a century ago.
Our nation’s routine condescension to black racists like Reverend Wright is insulting and creates utter disaster for blacks. Wright’s rhetoric encourages easy moral excuses for murder, mayhem and a total disregard for the norms of civilized society. White criminals are at least treated with enough respect to be held morally responsible for their crimes. With black criminals, liberals believe it’s always th
e lash of racism that made them do it, and racist cops, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors who convicted them.
We have recited the civic mantra for half a century: An institution that was wiped out 150 years ago is responsible for all bad behavior of blacks. This little mental exercise has led to a world in which blacks murder, assault, rape and sell drugs at rates that stagger the imagination, yet cannot understand why the avenues of prosperity remain closed to them.
Apparently endless jawboning about black grievances is not the soothing emolument liberals imagined it would be. Can’t we return to the halcyon days between the OJ verdict and the Obama campaign, when whites weren’t presumed to be harboring racist fantasies and blacks weren’t presumed to be children?
No, we can’t. Obama is up for reelection.
Obama has repeatedly returned to the well of racial divisiveness to serve his political ends. His 2008 presidential campaign managed to revive the white guilt that had long since dissipated, and then hinted that the one path to racial reconciliation was to make him president. Only then could we stop talking about race—a conversation he had initiated in the first place.
Alas, since he’s been president, that’s all we talk about.
The Obama presidency has been like the David Dinkins mayoralty all over again, with utter incompetence being papered over with appeals to white guilt.
At least Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave us a time limit on how much longer government discrimination against white people would be legal to make up for the historical injustices: twenty-five years.
With the Democrats it never ends.
It doesn’t matter that the race-baiters were proved to be lying hucksters every five minutes throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties, up until the OJ verdict. Whenever the America-is-still-racist story fell apart, the media never told us the conclusions to the story, so they feel their false alarms shouldn’t count.
The non-Fox media leapt on the Trayvon Martin shooting like Ted Kennedy on a case of scotch. Following procedure, as soon as their version of events began to collapse, liberals put the story in a lead casket and dropped it to the bottom of the ocean. The nation eagerly awaits their next example of America-is-a-racist-country, which will again turn out to be a hoax. But maybe there’s still time to make up a good one before November 6.
Nothing can be left to cruel chance! Liberals are gearing up for the racial mau-mauing of a lifetime. To save Obama, liberals have gone right back to their old tricks. Let’s review them.
CHAPTER 2
INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN WHITE
From the end of the Civil War through the beginning of the twentieth century, law enforcement was nonexistent for black Americans in places controlled by Democrats. Because the Ku Klux Klan was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party—sometimes with overlapping memberships—government officials were often aligned with the terrorist thugs. The Klan was to the Democrats what the ACLU is today: Not every Democrat is an ACLUer, but every ACLUer is a Democrat. Same with the Klan.
When an African American marine, Robert F. Williams, returned to his hometown of Monroe, North Carolina, after serving in World War II, the Klan was riding high, utterly unmolested by the local police. Black doctors and lawyers were abandoning the NAACP in droves for fear of Klan reprisals.
Williams wasn’t easily intimidated. So he revived the local chapter, instantly making himself a target of Klan violence. Once, a local Klansman nearly drove Williams off the road and over a seventy-five-foot cliff. The cars locked bumpers and the Klansman began whipping Williams’s car back and forth across the highway, then tried to push the car into the intersection of a busy highway, which Williams avoided only by driving into a ditch. Williams banged on his horn to attract the attention of some nearby highway patrolmen. They just laughed and turned away.
When Williams reported the crime to a local policeman, the man refused to issue a warrant, saying he didn’t see anything wrong with Williams’s car. A crowd had gathered, so the officer told Williams they’d have to go back to the station to fill out a report. He explained that although Williams had the assailant’s name, car type and license plate number, that still would not be enough for a warrant. He suggested Williams take it to the district attorney. The DA responded by calling the perpetrator and asking him if he did it. Williams’s assailant denied it, and that ended the matter. (It sounded suspiciously like the way the media “investigates” Democrat scandals. John Edwards denies he had an affair with Rielle Hunter and that’s good enough for us!)
As local law enforcement looked the other way—often having to break their necks to do so—it was open season on blacks in Monroe. The violent intimidation would have continued, too, except that Williams applied for and received a charter from the National Rifle Association—started by Union officers—and founded the Black Armed Guards.
The next time the Klan came to town, they planned to attack a black doctor. But on this occasion they were met by Williams’s Armed Guards protecting the man’s home. It only took one shootout for the local Democrats to finally ban the Klan from Monroe. As the saying goes, “It’s not so much fun when the rabbit’s got the gun.” This miraculous policy change brought about by blacks willing to defend themselves is described in Williams’s book, Negroes With Guns.1
(Noticeably, Justice Clarence Thomas, the only Supreme Court justice actually victimized by Jim Crow, has some rather lucid thoughts about the constitutional right to bear arms against racist mobs, as set forth in his concurrence in McDonald v. City of Chicago, upholding the Second Amendment against the states.)
Democrats eventually figured out that they were losing more votes than they were winning by supporting Jim Crow, so they dropped the segregationist wing of their party and started acting as if they had been battling segregationists all along, rather than harboring them, which was the truth. Liberals were mortified that Republicans, especially Eisenhower and Nixon, had led the fight to end segregation while—as Nixon said—Democrats were still squeezing “the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”
Driven by psychological deflection as well as their usual demagogic tendencies, Democrats turned around and started accusing everyone but themselves of racism, especially Republicans.
In the sixties, Democrats were slapping Orval Faubus on the back and courting George Wallace supporters. But once the danger was over, liberals decided to play-act being civil-rights champions.
Republicans had finally gotten all Democrats to start treating blacks as equal before the law and the next thing you knew, Democrats were treating blacks as above the law. Liberals have never been able to get the hang of a color-blind justice system. They went right back to their old tricks, looking for new victims and new villains. This time, black criminals were the victims and white cops were the villains—villains in the mold of Bull Connor. Who was a Democrat. The Democratic Party has always favored racial discrimination; it just switched which race should be discriminated against.
The new racial agitators came out full force in New York City, as well as in other big cities with virtually no history of race discrimination—but with lots of liberal journalists.
Suddenly, instead of worrying about black children in white schools, Democrats were terrified of the Klan taking over the New York City police force! They claimed the hotbeds of racism had migrated from the South to places like Queens, New York. In fact, all that had happened was that the Democrats’ scapegoats had changed: Instead of poor southern blacks, the new patsies were working-class whites, often Irish, Italian and Polish—usually cops. This wasn’t Mississippi in the 1960s, so liberals weren’t putting themselves in any actual danger. But they got to pretend that they were very brave.
You can never rest with liberals. As soon as it seems as if some horror from the past has been excised, you look away for five minutes and the next thing you know, you’re back on the five-yard line.
For many years, it was impossible to have a rational d
iscussion about certain issues, especially race. It was all part of the cultural revolution emanating from the universities and the media, the distinguishing feature of which was that you had to say goodbye to everything you ever knew. There was sex, drugs and the pill—but also severe restrictions on what you were allowed to notice. Common sense was outlawed. If you objected to going to a certain part of town, for example, you’d be told it was just because you were afraid of blacks. You wouldn’t mind being raped and cut up by a white guy! No, really, I would.
As certain subjects and words became taboo, we got the first glimmerings of political correctness, leading to people praising “the men and women of the Green Bay Packers.” That’s the whole point of taboos. People don’t need edicts telling them not to stick pencils in their eyes. But to force society to abandon common sense required constant monitoring. Violators were severely punished.
To the satisfaction of New York Times editors, who managed to avoid all day-to-day contact with any black people, everyone walked on eggshells, afraid of making a career-ending slip of the tongue.
In 1988, Jimmy Snyder, known as “Jimmy the Greek,” a football personality, was instantly fired from CBS News for attributing blacks’ athletic prowess to breeding by slave owners: “During the slave period, the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he could have a big black kid—that’s where it all started.”2 For devotees of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Snyder’s theory shouldn’t have been controversial, much less offensive. But he had mentioned slavery, so he was a racist.
The one taboo so powerful that even an elderly sports commentator couldn’t have missed it was that no one was allowed to notice the increasing criminality among blacks.